“I like to know what?” he snaps back, and slammed the stove door.
Mis’ Toplady, she looked at him tranquil over the tops of her two pairs of spectacles.
“Something that’s in folks,” says she—and went on hunting up her spoons.
THE TIME HAS COME
When the minister’s wife sent for me that day, it was a real bad time, because I’d been doing up my tomato preserves and I’d stood on my feet till they was ready to come off. But as soon as I got the last crock filled, I changed my dress and pushed my hair up under my hat and thought I’d remember to keep my old shoes underneath my skirt.
The minister’s parlor is real cool and shady—she keeps it shut up all day, and it kind of smells of its rose jar and its silk cushions and the dried grasses in the grate; and I sank down in the horse-hair patent rocker, and was glad of the rest. But I kept wondering what on earth the minister’s wife could want of me. It wasn’t the season for missionary barrels or lumberman’s literature—the season for them is house-cleaning time when we don’t know what all to do with the truck, and we take that way of getting rid of it and, same time, providing a nice little self-indulgence for our consciences. But this was the dead of Summer, and everybody sunk deep in preserves and vacations and getting their social indebtedness paid off and there wasn’t anything going around to be dutiful about for, say, a month or six weeks yet, when the Fall woke up, and the town begun to get out the children’s school-clothes and hunt ’em for moths.
“Well, Calliope,” says the minister’s wife, “I s’pose you wonder what I’ve got important to say to you.”
“True,” says I, “I do. But my feet ache so,” I says graceful, “I’m perfectly contented to set and listen to it, no matter what it is.”
She scraped her chair a little nearer—she was a dear, fat woman, that her breathing showed through her abundance. She had on a clean, starched wrapper, too short for anything but home wear, and long-sleeved cotton under-wear that was always coming down over her hands, in July or August, and making you feel what a grand thing it is to be shed of them—I don’t know of anything whatever that makes anybody seem older than to see long, cotton undersleeves on them and the thermometer 90° at the City Bank corner.
“Well,” says she, “Calliope, the Reverend and I—” she always called her husband the Reverend—“has been visiting in the City, as you know. And while there we had the privilege of attending the Church of the Divine Life.”