It was a week after the "prom.;" all the men had gone home, and all the violets had faded, before anything else of particular interest took place. Mary Brooks, to be sure, had been going about wearing her preoccupied, important air and had declined various invitations on the plea that she was busy; but nobody thought anything of that, because Mary was always having periods of strenuous and conscientious effort, surrounded on all sides, as Katherine Kittredge put it, by periods of the exact opposite.