Neighborhood Stories

lis wro

er been here since the time I had sciatica and was cross.

e back

ve next fall, but I’ll bring my cook-stove and co

answ

nd these women are certainly making a circus parade of themselves. However, we’ll even

would be like that. The poor thing has had such an easy

that the automobile would be there for me. And I wrote her that I would come down the platform

used to being a big house, there was a little boy sit

matter, la

n’ to beg,” says the chauf—— that w

fellow’d woke u

big box. The man looked at the label. “They ain’t no

his family made toys for the uptown shops, and somebody in our neighborhood had ordered some direct, and

ee if we’d have time to take him home be

real sweet little fellow, about seven. He told me his part in making the toys, and his mother’s, and his two little sisters’, and I giv

ed—that struck me as so awful—she’d forgot how to look surprised, just the same as a grand lady that’s learned not to; and there was the stumpy man that grunted for short instead of bothering with words; and the two little girls that might of been anybody’s—if the

getting in the automobile. “I’m sorry

ell, yes,” I says, “poor people is

nd sparkles and so on, and had gone in her parlor-with-another-name, and set down in the midst of flowers and shades an

t dying to hear a

hand and shut h

hey seem to want to attract attention to themselves. They seem

ry, “but it ain’t any of them, Aunt E

er school taught not manners, but {220}manner—and what she would say to the womanhood of to-

we’re trying to learn now, manner of being alive.

e was something else to it we didn’t know—yet. And thousands of women on foot, and thousands of women in windows.... I looked at them and wondered if they thought we were, and life was, as decent as we and it could be, and, if not, how they were preparing to help change it. I thought of the rest that were up town in colored nests, and them t

we’re just beginnin

ncing to balls, nor racking up and down in shops buying pretty things to make ’em power, nor just paddling around a kitchen the same as mine had always done—but feet that were marching, in a big, peaceful ar

ing round and round, manufacturing the days and t

at out by thousands of hearts all over the world. I’d never seen women like this before. I saw them like I’d never seen them—I felt I

lis making a little

. “When I was a girl we used to use the word ladylike—we used

ad, “for five or ten thousand ye

e it—they like the publicity

t used to watch martyrs were heard to say that martyrs prob’ly thought flames was becoming or they wouldn’t be burnt. But when I looked at Aunt Ellis sitting in

little waxy-looking thing, that couldn’t look surprised or exalted or afraid or anything else, and I knew her in a minute—even to the red calico waist and

r and touche

ind,” I says;

like I’d turned i

—I feel it like they do. And them that sees it and feels it and

and then I saw something. While I was making my way through the crowd to them the line h

rest, “you’re college, ain’t you? And

nd put out h

on,” s

way—but what is the way? I only know that all down the street, between the rows of watching faces, I could think of that little waxy woman going along ahead, and of the kind of place that she called home, and of the kind of

ving tea. She smiled at me kind of

ve ’em the rest of my cook-sto

hat’s just the trouble. You all

l times on the street. I c

ike. I’ve never{225} had the time to have them, myself. Well,” I says, t

at her, m

l be conservatives together. And there’ll be some big new day coming on that would startle me now, just the sam