"She's so right an' left cuffy—I guess that's the whole thing," Calliope put it in her rich idiom.
"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like her for, even if it was only her husband."
"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin from his brain."
I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson—who, in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering, objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over—I most unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to smile at all.
Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java tea.
"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the tea?'"
Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.
"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big mind to go home to bed."