"'I hope, Calliope,' said Postmaster Silas Sykes to me, 'that you ain't in favour of women suffrage.'

"'No, Silas,' says I, 'I ain't.'

"And I felt all over me a kind of a nice wild joy at saying a thing that I knew a male creature would approve of.

"Silas was delivering the groceries himself that day, and accepting of a glass of milk in my kitchen doorway. And on my kitchen stoop Letty Ames—that had come home in time for the Proudfit party—was a-sitting, a-stitching away on a violet muslin breakfast-cap. It was the next day after the party and my regular wash-day and I was glad to be back in my own house, washing quiet, with Emerel Daniel to help me.

"'At school,' says Letty, 'everybody was for it.'

"'I know it,' says Silas, gloomy. 'The schools is goin' to the dogs, hot-foot. Women suffrage, tinkerin' pupils' teeth, cremation—I don't know what-all their holdin' out for. In my day they stuck to 'rithmetic and toed the crack.'

"'That isn't up to date, Mr. Sykes,' says Letty, to get Silas riled.

"It done it. He waved his left arm, angular.

"'Bein' up to date is bein' up to the devil,' he begun, raspish, when I cut in, hasty and peaceful.

"'By the way, Silas,' I says, 'speaking of dates, it ain't more'n a year past the time you aldermen was going to clear out Black Hollow, is it? Ain't you going to get it done this spring?'

"'Oh, dum it, no,' Silas says. 'They're all after us now to get to pavin' that new street.'

"'That street off there in the marsh. I know they are,' I says innocent. 'Your cousin's makin' the blocks, ain't he, Silas?'

"Just then, in from the shed where she was doing my washing come Emerel Daniel—a poor little thing that looked like nothing but breath with the skin drawn over it—and she was crying.

"'Oh, Miss Marsh,' she says, 'I guess you'll have to leave me go home. I left little Otie so sick—I hadn't ought to of left him—only I did want the fifty cents....'

"'Otie!' I says. 'I thought Otie was getting better.'

"'I've kept sayin' so because I was ashamed to let folks know,' Emerel says, 'an' me leavin' him to work. But I had to have the money—'

"'Land,' I says, 'of course you did. Go on home. Silas'll take you in the delivery wagon, won't you, Silas? You're going right that way, ain't you?'

"'I wasn't,' says Silas, 'but I can go round that way to oblige.' That's just exactly how Silas is.

"'Emerel,' I says, 'when you go by the Hollow, you tell Silas what you was tellin' me—about the smells from there into your house. Silas,' I says, 'that hole could be filled up with sand-bar sand dirt cheap, now while the river's low, and you know it.'

"'Woman—' Silas begins excitable.

"'Of course you can't,' I saved him the trouble, 'not while the council is running pavement halfway acrost the swamp to graft off'n the Wooden Block folks. That's all, Silas. I know you, head and heart,' I says, some direct.

"'You don't understand city dealin's no more'n—Who-a!' Silas yells, pretending his delivery horse needed him, and lit down the walk, Emerel following. Silas reminds me of the place in the atmosphere where a citizen ought to be, and ain't.

"Emerel had left the clothes in the bluing water, so I stood and talked with Letty a minute, stitching away on her muslin breakfast-cap.

"'I'd be for women voting just because Silas isn't,' she says, feminine.

"'In them words,' says I to her, 'is some of why women shouldn't do it. The most of 'em reason,' I says, 'like rabbits!'

"Letty sort of straightened up and looked at me, gentle. She just graduated from the Indian Mound School and, in spite of yourself, you notice what she says. 'You're mistaken, Miss Marsh,' says she, 'I believe in women voting because we're folks and mothers, and we can't bring up our children with men taking things away from 'em that we know they'd ought to have. I want to bring up my children by my votes as well as by my prayers,' says she.

"'Your children!' says I.

"I donno if you've ever noticed that look come in a girl's face when she speaks of her children that are going to be sometime? Up to that minute I'd 'a' thought Letty's words was brazen. But when I see how she looked when she said it, I sort of turned my eyes away, kind of half reverent. We didn't speak so when I was a girl. The most we ever heard mentioned like that was when our mothers showed us our first baby dress and told us that was for our baby—and then we always looked away, squeamish.

"'That's kind of nice,' I says, slow, 'your owning up, out loud that way, that maybe you might possibly have—have one, sometime.'

"'My mother has talked to me about it since I began to know—everything,' Letty said.

"That struck awful near home.

"'I always wisht,' I says, 'I'd talked with my mother—like that. I always wisht I'd had her tell me about the night I was born. I think everybody ought to know about that. But I remember when she begun to speak about it, I always kind of shied off. I should think it would of hurt her. But then,' I says, 'I never had any of my own. So it don't matter.'

"'Oh, yes, you have, Miss Marsh,' says Letty.

"I looked at her, blank.

"'Every child that's born belongs to you,' says Letty to me, solemn.

"'Go on,' says I, to draw her out. 'I wouldn't own most of the little jackanapesses.'

"'But you do,' says Letty, 'and so do I! So does every woman, mother or not.'

"She set the little violet muslin cap on her head to try it, and swept up and made me a little bow. Pretty as a picture she looked, and ready for loving.... I always wonder if things ain't sometimes arranged to happen in patterns, same as crystals. For why else should it be that at that instant minute young Elbert Sykes, Silas's son, that was home for the party and a little longer, come up to my door with a note from his mother—and see Letty in the violet cap, bowing like a rose?

"While they was a-talking easy, like young folks knows how to do nowdays, I read the note; and it was about what had started Silas to talking suffrage. Mis' Sykes had opened her house to a suffrage meeting that evening, and Mis' Martin Lacy from the City was a-going to talk, and would I go over?

"'Land, yes,' I says to Elbert. 'Tell her I'll come, just for something to do. I wonder if I can bring Letty, too?'

"'Mother'd be proud, I know,' says Elbert, looking at her like words, and them words a-praising. They had used to play together when they was little, but school had come in and kind of made them over.

"'So,' says he to Letty, bantering, 'you're in favour of women voting, are you?'

"She broke off her thread and looked up at him.

"'Of course I am,' she says, giving a cunning little kitten nod that run all down her shoulders.

"'So you think,' says Elbert, 'that you're just as strong as I am—to carry things along? Mind you, I don't say as clever. You're easily that. But put it at just strong.'

"She done the little nod again, nicer than the first time.

"'You talk like folks voted with their muscles,' says she. 'Well, I guess some men do, judging by the results.'

"He laughed, but he went on.

"'And you think,' he says, 'that you would be just as wonderful in public life as you would be in your home—your very own home?'

"Letty put the last stitch in her muslin cap and she set it on her head—all cloudy and rose-budded, and land, land, she was lovely when she looked up.

"'Surely,' she says from under the ruffle, with a little one-cornered smile.

"He laughed right into her eyes. 'I don't believe you think so,' he says, triumphant. And all of a sudden there come a-sticking up its head in his face the regular man look—I can't rightly name it, but every woman in the world knows it when she sees it—a kind of an I'm the one of us two but don't let's stop pretending it's you look.

"When she see it, what do you suppose Letty done? First she looked down. Then she blushed. Then she shrugged up one shoulder and laughed, sort of little and low and soft. And she kept still. She was about as much like the dignified woman that had just been talking to me about women's duty as a bow of blue ribbon is like my work apron. And as plain as the blue on the sky, I see that she liked the minute when she let Elbert beat her—liked it, with a sort of a glow and a quiver.

"He laughed again, and, 'You stay just the the way you are,' he says, and he contrived to make them common words sort of flow all over her like petting.

"That evening, when we marched into the Sykes's house to the meeting, he spoke to her like that again. The men was invited to the meeting, too, but Mis' Sykes let it be known that they needn't to come till the coffee and sandwiches, thus escaping the speech. Mis' Sykes ain't in favour of suffrage, but she does love a new thing in town, and Mis' Martin Lacy was so well dressed and so soft-spoken that Mis' Sykes would of left her preach foot-binding in her parlour if she'd wanted to. Mis' Sykes is like that. Letty was about the youngest there, and she was about the prettiest I 'most ever saw; and when he'd got them all seated, young Elbert Sykes, that was the only man there, just naturally gravitated over and set down by her, like the Lord meant. I love to see them little things happen, and I never smile at them, same as some. Because it's like I got a peek in behind the curtain and see the eternal purpose working away, quiet and still.

"Well, Mis' Lacy, she talked, and she put things real sane and plain, barring I didn't believe any of what she said. And pretty soon I stopped trying to listen and I begun thinking about Emerel Daniel. I'd been down to see her just before supper, and I hadn't had her out of my head much of the time since. Emerel's cottage wasn't half a block from Black Hollow, the great low place beyond the river road that the town used as a dump. It was full of things without names, and take it on a day with the wind just right, Emerel had to keep her window shut on that side of her house. Water was standing in the hollow all the whole time. Flies and mosquitoes come from it by the flock and the herd. And when I'd held my nose and scud past it that afternoon to get to Emerel's, I'd almost run into Dr. Heron, just coming out from seeing Otie, and I burst right out with my thoughts all over him, and asked him if Black Hollow wasn't what was the matter with Otie and if it wasn't all that was the matter with him.

"'Unquestionably,' says Dr. Heron. 'I told Mrs. Daniel six months ago that she must move.'

"'Well,' says I, 'not having any of her other country homes open this year, Emerel had to stay where she was. And Otie with her. But what did you say to the council about filling in the hole?'

"'The council,' says Dr. Heron, 'is paving the county swamp. There's a good crop of wooden blocks this year.'

"'True enough,' says I, grim, 'and Otie is a-paying for it.'

"That was exactly how the matter stood. And all the while Mis' Lacy was a-talking her women suffrage, I set there grieving for Emerel, and wondering how it was that Silas Sykes and Timothy Toplady and Jimmy Sturgis and even Eppleby Holcomb, that belonged to the common council, could set by and see Otie die, and more or less of the rest of us in the same kind of danger.

"Next I knew, Mis' Lacy, that was all silky movements and a sweet voice, had got through her own talk and was asking us ladies to express ourselves. Everybody felt kind of delicate at first, and then Libby Liberty starts up and spoke her mind:—

"'I believe all you've been a-saying,' she says, 'and I hev for twenty years. I never kill a hen without I realize how good the women can do a human being's work if they're put to it.'

"'I always think of that, too,' says Mis' Hubbelthwait, quick, 'about the hotel....' She kind of stopped, but we all knew what she meant. Threat is seldom if ever sober, especially on election day; but he votes, and she only runs the hotel and keeps them both out of the poorhouse.

"'Well, look at me,' says Abagail Arnold, 'doin' work to oven and to counter, an' can't get my nose near nothin' public but my taxes.'

"'Of course,' says Mis' Uppers, rocking, 'I've almost been the mayor of Friendship Village, bein' his wife, so. An' I must say he never done a thing I didn't think I could do. Or less it was the junketin' trips. I'd 'a' been down with one o' my sick headaches on every one o' them.'

"'Men know more,' admitted Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, 'but I donno as they can do any more than us. When the Fire Chief was alive an' holdin' office an' entertaining politicians, I use' often to think o' that, when I had their hot dinner to get.'

"'I s'pose men do know more than we do,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, reflective. 'I know Eppleby is lightnin' at figures, an' he can tell about time-tables, an' he sees sense to fine print parts o' the newspapers that looks like so many doctors' prescriptions to me. An' yet honestly, when it comes to some questions of sense, I've known Eppleby not to have any.'

"'Jimmy, either,' says Mis' Sturgis, confidential. 'I donno. I've thought about that a good deal. It seems as if, if we got the chance, us women might not vote brilliant at first, but we would vote with our sense. The sense that can pick out a pattern and split a receipt, an' dress the children out o' the house money. I bet there's a lot o' that kind o' sense among women that don't get used up, by a long shot.'

"Mis' Timothy Toplady drew her shawl up her back, like she does.

"'Well-a,' she says, 'Timothy's an awful good husband, but when I see some of the things he buys for the house, an' the way he gets took in on real estate, I often wonder if he's such a good citizen as he lets on.'

"I kep' a-wondering why Letty didn't say something, and by and by I nudged her.

"'Go on, speak up,' I intimated.

"And, same time, I heard Elbert Sykes, on the other side, say something to her, low. 'I could tell them,' he says to her, 'that to look like you do is better than being elected!'

"And Letty—what do you s'spose?—she just glanced up at him, and made a little kind of a commenting wrinkle with her nose, and looked down and kept her silence. Just like he'd set there with a little fine chain to her wrist.

"We talked some more and asked some questions and heard Mis' Lacy read some, and then it was time for the men. They come in together—six or eight of them, and most of them, as it happened, members of the common council. And when Mis' Sykes had set them down on the edge of the room, and before anybody had thought of any remark to pass, Mis' Lacy she spoke up and ask' the men to join in the discussion, and called on Mis' Sykes, that hadn't said nothing yet, to start the ball a-rolling.

"'Well,' says Mis' Sykes, with her little society pucker, 'I must say the home and bring-up my children seems far, far more womanly to me than the tobacco smoke and whiskey of public life.'

"She glanced over to the men, kind of with a way of arching her neck and they all gave her a sort of a little ripple, approving. And with this Mis' Toplady kind of tossed her head up.

"'Oh, well, I don't want the responsibility,' she says. 'Land, if I was a votin' woman, I should feel as if I'd got bread in the pan and cake in the oven and clothes in the bluin' water all the whole time.'

"'He, he, he!' says Timothy, her lawful lord. And Silas and Jimmy Sturgis and the rest joined in, tuneful.

"Then Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, she vied in, and done a small, careless laugh.

"'Oh, well, me, too,' she says, 'I declare, as I get older an' wake up some mornin's I feel like life was one big breakfast to get an' me the hired girl. If I had to vote besides, I donno what I would do.'

"'An',' says Mis' Hubbelthwait, 'I always feel as if a politician was a disgrace to be, same as an actor, unless you got to be a big one. An' can us women ever be big ones even if we want? Which I'm sure I don't want,' she says, sidling a look towards the men's row.

"'Oh, not only that,' says Abagail Arnold, 'but you'd feel so kind of sheepish votin' for the President, away off there in Washington. I always feel terrible sheepish even prayin' for him, let alone votin'—an' like it couldn't make no real difference.'

"'Oh, an' ladies!' says Mis' Mayor Uppers, 'really it's bad enough to have been the wife of a mayor. If I had to vote an' was in danger of coming down with a nomination for somethin' myself, I couldn't get to sleep nights.'

"'Mercy,' said Mis' Fire Chief Merriman, 'a mayor is nothin' but a baby in public life compared to a fire chief. A mayor gets his night's rest. Could a woman ever chase to fires at three o'clock in the mornin'? An' if she votes, what's to prevent her bein' elected to some such job by main strength?'

"'Or like enough get put on a jury settin' on a murderer, an' hev to look at dug-up bones an' orgins,' says Mis' Sturgis—her that's an invalid and gloomy by complexion.

"And one and all, as they spoke, they looked sidewise to the men for their approval. And they got it.

"'That's the ticket!' says Timothy Toplady, slapping his knee. 'I tell you, gentlemen, we've got a nice set of women folks here in this town. They don't prostitute their brains to no fool notions.'

"There was a little hush, owing to that word that Timothy had used kind of uncalled for, and then a little quick buzz of talk to try to cover it. And in the buzz I heard Elbert saying to Letty:

"'You know you think of yourself in a home afterward—and not around at polls and things, Letty.'

"'You don't have to board at the polls because you vote there, you know,' Letty said; but she says it with a way, with a way. She said it like a pretty woman talking to a man that's looking in her eyes and thinking how pretty she is, and she knows he's thinking so. And you can't never get much real arguing done that way.

"It always kind of scares me to see myself showed up—and now it was like I had ripped a veil off the whole sex, and off me, too. I see us face to face. Why was it that before them men had come in, the women had all talked kind of doubtful and suffrage-leaning, and then had veered like the wind the minute the men had come on the scene? Mis' Toplady had defied Timothy time after time, both public and private; Mis' Hubbelthwait bosses her husband not only drunk but sober; Mis' Sturgis don't do a thing Jimmy wants without she happens to want it too—and so on. Yet at the mention of this one thing, these women that had been talking intelligent and wondering open-minded had all stopped being the way they was and had begun to say things sole to please the men. Even Libby Liberty had kept still—her that has a regular tongue in her head. And Letty, that believed in it all, and had talked to me so womanly that morning, she was listening and blushing for Elbert and holding her peace. And then I remembered, like a piece of guilt, sensing that nice, wild feeling I myself had felt that morning a-denying woman suffrage in the presence of Postmaster Silas Sykes. What in creation ailed us all?

"What in creation.... Them words sort of steadied me. It looked to me like it was creation itself that ailed us yet. Creation is a thing that it takes most folks a good while to recover from....

" ... I remembered seeing Silas's delivery boy go whistling along the street one night, and pass a cat. The cat wasn't doing nothing active. It was merely idle. But the boy brought up a big shingle he was carrying and swished it through the air and says 'Z-t-t-t-t,' to the cat's heels, to see the cat take to them—which it done—like the cat immemorial has done for immemorial boys, delivery and other. And once, at dusk, a big, strange man with a gun on his shoulder passed me on Daphne Street, and when he done so, he says to me 'Z-t-t-t,' under his breath, just like the boy to the cat, and just like the untamed man immemorial has said when he got the chance. It seemed to me like men was created with, so to say, a shingle and a gun, for the hunting, and just as there is joy in their hunting, so there is a palpitatin' delight in being hunted and flattered by being caught and bound, hand and foot and mind.

"'We like it—why, I tell you, we like it,' I says to myself, 'and us here in Mis' Sykes's parlour are burning with the old original, left-over fire, breathed at creation into women's breasts!'

"And it seemed like I kind of touched hands with all the women that used to be. And I looked over to that row of grinning, tired men, not so very much dressed up, and I thought:—

"'Why, you're the men of this world and we're the women, and there ain't no more thrilling fact in this universe. And why don't we all reco'nize it and shut up?'

"That was what I was thinking over in my mind while Mis' Martin Lacy said good night to us and rushed off to catch her train for the City, hoping she had made us see some light. That was what I was still going over when Mis' Sykes called me to help with the refreshments. And then, just as I started out to the kitchen, the outside door that was part open was pushed in and somebody come in the room. It was Emerel Daniel, in calico and no hat. And as soon as we see her face, everybody stopped talking and stared. She was white as the table-cloth and shaking.

"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'won't one of you come down to the house? Otie's worse—I donno what it is. I donno what to do to take care of him.'

"She broke down, poor, nervous little thing, and sort of swallowed her whole throat. And Mis' Toplady and we all rushed right over to her.

"'Why, Emerel,' Mis' Toplady says, 'I thought Otie was getting ever so much better. Is it the real typhoid, do you s'pose?' she ask' her.

"Emerel looked over to me. 'Isn't it?' she says. And then I spoke right up with all there is to me.

"'Yes, sir,' I says, 'it is the real typhoid. And if you want to know what's giving it to him, ladies and gentlemen, ask the common council that's setting over there by the wall. Dr. Heron says that Black Hollow, that's a sink for the whole town, give it to him, and that nothing else did—piled full of diseases right in back of Emerel's house. And if you want to know who's responsible for his dying if he dies,' I says right out, 'look over in the same direction to the men that wouldn't vote to fill in the Black Hollow with sand because they needed the money so bad for paving up half the county swamp.'

"It was most as still in the room as when Timothy had said 'prostitute.' All but me. I went right on—nothing could of kept me still then.

"'Us ladies,' I says, 'has tried for two years to get the Council to fill in that hole. We've said and said what would happen to some of us, what with our pumps so near the place, and what with flies from it visiting our dinner-table dishes, sociable and continual. What did you say to us? You said women hadn't no idee of town finances. Mebbe we ain't—mebbe we ain't. But we have got some idea of town humanity, if I do say it, that share in it. And this poor little boy has gone to work and proved it.'

"With that, Emerel, who had been holding in—her that's afraid even to ask for starch if you forget to give it to her—she broke right down and leaned her head on her arm on the clock shelf:—

"'Oh,' she says, 'all the years I been giving him his victuals and his bath and sewing his clothes up, I never meant it to come to this—for no reason. If Otie dies, I guess he needn't of—that's the worst. He needn't of.'

"Mis' Toplady put her arm right around Emerel and kind of poored her shoulder in that big, mother way she's got—and it was her that went with her, like it's always Mis' Toplady that does everything. And us ladies turned around and all begun to talk at once.

"'Let's plan out right here about taking things in to Emerel,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss. 'I've got some fresh bread out of the oven. I'll carry her a couple of loaves, and another couple next baking or two.'

"'I'll take her in a hen,' says Libby Liberty, 'so be she'll kill it herself.'

"Somebody else said a ham, and somebody some butter, and Libby threw in some fresh eggs, if she got any. Mis' Hubbelthwait didn't have much to do with, but she said she would take turns setting up with Otie. Mis' Sykes give a quarter—she don't like to bake for folks, but she's real generous with money. And Silas pipes in:—

"'Emerel can have credit to the store till Otie begins to get better,' he said. 'I ain't been lettin' her have it. She's looked so peaked I been afraid she wan't a-goin' to be able to work, an' I didn't want she should be all stacked up with debts.'

"But me, I set there a-thinking. And all of a sudden I says out what I thought: 'Ladies,' I says, 'and all of you: What to Emerel is hens and hams and credit? They ain't,' I says, 'nothing but patches and poultices on what's the trouble up to her house.'

"Eppleby Holcomb, that hadn't been saying much, spoke up:—

"'I know,' he says, 'I know. You mean what good do they do to the boy.'

"'I mean just that,' I says. 'What good is all that to Otie that's lying over by Black Hollow? And how does it keep the rest of the town safe?'

"'Well,' says Silas, eager, 'let's us get out the zinc wagon you ladies bought, and let's us go to collectin' the garbage again so that won't all be dumped in Black Hollow. And leave the ladies keep on payin' for it. It's real ladies' work, I think, bein' as it's no more'n a general scrapin' up of ladies' kitchens.'

"Then Letty Ames, that hadn't been saying anything, spoke up, to nobody in particular:—

"'Otie's a dear little soul,' she said, 'a dear little soul!'

"'Ain't he?' says Marne Holcomb. 'Eppleby 'most always has a nut or somethin' in his pocket to give him as he goes by. He takes it like a little squirrel an' like a little gentleman.'

"'He's awful nice when he comes in the shop,' said Abagail. 'He looks at the penny-apiece kind and then buys the two-for-a-cent, so's to give his mother one.'

"'He knows how to behave in a store,' Silas admitted. 'I 'most always give him a coffee-berry, just to see him thank me.'

"'He come into the hotel one day,' says Mis' Hubbelthwait, 'an' stood by me when I was bakin'. I give him a little wad of dough to roll.'

"'I let him drive the 'bus one day, settin' on my knee,' says Jimmy Sturgis. 'He was a nice, careful, complete little cuss.'

"Eppleby Holcomb nodded with his eyes shut.

"'We don't like folks to swing on our front gate,' he says. 'He done it, but he marched right in and told us he'd done it. I give him a doughnut—an' he's kep' right on swingin' an' ownin' up an' eatin' doughnuts.'

"'Even when he chased my chickens,' says Libby Liberty, 'he chased 'em like a little gentleman—towards the coop an' not down the road. I always noticed that about him.'

"'Yes,' says Letty, again, 'he's a dear little soul. What makes us let him die?'

"She said it so calm that it caught even my breath—and my breath, in these things, ain't easy caught. But I got it right back again, and I says:—

"'Yes, sir. He was on the way to being somebody that Friendship Village could have had for the right kind of an inmate. And now he'll be nothing but a grave, that's no good to anybody. And Sodality,' I couldn't help adding, 'will likely pitch right in and take care of his grave, tasteful.'

"And when I said that, it come over me how Emerel had dressed him and bathed him and made his clothes, and done washings, tireless, to get the fifty cents—besides bringing him into the world, tedious. And now it was all going for nothing, all for nothing—when we could of helped it. And I plumped out with what I'd said that morning to Silas:—

"'Why don't you fill up Black Hollow with sand-bar sand out of the river, now it's so low? Then, even if it's too late for Otie, mebbe we can keep ourselves from murderin' anybody else.'

"Them half a dozen men of the common council set still a minute, looking down at Mis' Sykes's parlour ingrain. And I looked over at them, and my heart come up in my throat and both of them ached like the toothache. Because all of a sudden it seemed to me it wasn't just Timothy and Eppleby and Silas and some more of the council setting there by the wall—but it was like, in them few men, tired and not so very well dressed, was setting the lawmakers of the whole world; and there in front of them, wasn't only Mis' Holcomb and Libby and Letty and me, but Emerel Daniel, too, and all the women there is—saying to them: 'My land, we've dressed 'em an' bathed 'em an' sewed for 'em an' brought 'em into the world, tedious. Let 'em live—fix things so's they can live an' so's it needn't all go for nothin'.' And I sort of bubbled up and spilled over, as if everything we was all of us for had come up in my throat.

"'Oh, folks,' I says, 'just look what us in this room could have done for Otie—so be we'd begun in time.'

"Right like a dash of cold water into my face, Mis' Sykes spoke up, cold as some kind of death:—

"'Well, ladies,' she says, 'I guess we've got our eyes open now. I say that's what we'd ought to hev been doin' instead o' talkin' women votin',' she says, triumphant.

"Then somebody spoke again, in a soft, new, not-used-to-it little voice, and in her chair over beside Elbert, Letty Ames leaned forward, and her eyes was like the sunny places in water.

"'Don't you see,' she says, 'don't you see, Mis' Sykes, that's what Mis' Lacy meant?'

"'How so?' says Mis' Sykes, short.

"I'll never forget how sweet and shy and unexpected and young Letty looked, but she answered, as brave as brave:—

"'Otie Daniel is sick,' she said, 'and all us women can do is to carry him broth and bread and nurse him. It's only the men that can bring about the things to make him well. And they haven't done it. It's been the women who have been urging it—and not getting it done. Wasn't it our work to do, too?'

"I see Elbert looking at her—like he just couldn't bear to have her speak so, like some men can't. And I guess he spoke out in answer before he meant to:—

"'But let them do it womanly, Letty,' he said, 'like your mother did and my mother did.'

"Letty turned and looked Elbert Sykes straight in the face:—

"'Womanly!' she says. 'What is there womanly about my bathing and feeding a child inside four clean walls, if dirt and bad food and neglect are outside for him? Will you tell me if there is anything more womanly than my right to help make the world as decent for my children as I would make my own home?'

"I looked at Letty, and looked; and I see with a thrill I can't tell you about how Letty seemed. For she seemed the way she had that morning on my kitchen stoop, when she spoke of her children and when I felt like I'd ought to turn away—the way I'd used to when my mother showed me my baby dress and told me who it would be for. Only now—only now, somehow, I didn't want to turn away. Somehow I wanted to keep right on looking at Letty, like Elbert was looking. And I see what he see. How Letty was what she'd said that morning that she was—and that I was—and that we all was: A mother, then and there, whether she ever had any children or not. And she was next door to owning up to it right there before them all and before Elbert. We didn't speak so when I was a girl. We didn't own up, out loud, that we ever thought anything about what we was for. But now, when I heard Letty do it....

" ... Now, when I heard Letty do it, all to once, I looked into a window of the world. And instead of touching hands like I had with the women that use' to be, I looked off and off down all the time there's going to be, and for a minute I touched, tip-fingers, the hands of the other women that's coming towards me; and out of places inside of me that I didn't know before had eyes, I see them, mothers to the whole world, inside their four walls and out. And they wasn't coming with poultices and bread and broth in their hands, to patch up what had been left undone; nor with the keys to schoolhouses that they'd got open by scheming; nor with newspapers full of health that they'd had to run down back alleys to sell; nor national holidays that they'd got a-hold of through sheer accident; nor yet with nice new headstones for cemetery improvements on the dead and gone—no, sir, their hands wasn't occupied with any of these ways of serving that they'd schemed for and stole. But their hands—was in men's hands, closer and nearer than they'd ever been before. And their eyes was lit up with a look that was a new look, and that give new life to the old original left-over blaze. And I looked across to that row of tired men, not so very much dressed up, and I thought:—

"'You're the men of this world and we're the women. And there ain't no more thrilling fact in this universe, save one, save one: And that's that we're all human beings. That your job and ours is to make the world ready for the folks that are to come, and to make the folks that come fit to live in that new world. And yet over there by Black Hollow one of our children is dying from something that was your job and ours to do, and we didn't take hold of hands and do it!'

"'Oh, Letty!' I says out. 'And Silas and all of you! Let's pretend, just for a minute, that we was all citizens and equal. And let's figure out things for Otie, just like we had the right!'

"I'd asked Letty to spend the night with me, and Elbert walked home with us. And just as we got there, he says to her again:—

"'Oh, Letty—you ain't strong enough to help carry things along!'

"'You've got more strength,' she says to him, 'and more brains. But it isn't so much the strength or the brains in women that is going to help when the time comes. It's the—mother in them.'

"And I says to myself:—

"'And it's the—human beingness of them.' But Letty didn't know that yet.

"Elbert answered, after a minute:—

"'You may be right and you may be wrong, but, Letty, Letty, what a woman you are!'

"And at that Letty looked up at him, just as she had looked at him that morning—just for a minute, and then she dipped down the brim of her big hat. I donno what she answered him. I didn't care. I didn't care. For what I see was the old wild joy of a woman in being glorified by a male creature. And I knew then, and I know now, that that won't never die, no matter what.

"Elbert put out his hand.

"'Good night, Letty,' he said.

"She gave him hers, and he closed over it light with his other hand.

"'May I see you to-morrow?' he asked her.

"'Oh, I don't know,' said Letty. 'Come and see if I'll see you—will you?'

"He laughed a little, looking in her eyes.

"'At about eight,' he promised. 'Good night....'

"I got the key out from under the mat to a tune inside me. Because I'd heard, and I knew that Letty had heard, that tone in Elbert's voice that is the human tone—I can't rightly name it, but every woman in the world knows it when she hears it—a tone that says: If I have my way, you and I are going to live out our lives together.

"And I knew then, and I know now, that that tone won't ever die, either. And some day, away off in a new world right here on this earth, I believe there's going to be a wilder joy in being men and women than all the men and women up to now have ever lived or dared or dreamed.