"If it was anyways damp or chilly, Mis' Emmons always had a little blaze
in the grate--not a heat blaze, but just a Come-here blaze. And going
into her little what-she-called living-room at night, I always thought
was like pushing open some door of the dark to find a sort of
cubby-corner hollowed out from the bigger dark for tending the homey
fire. That rainy night we went in from the street almost right onto the
hearth. And it was as pleasant as taking the first mouthful of
something.
"Insley, with Christopher still on his back, stood on the rug in front
of the door and looked round him.
"'How jolly it always looks here, Mrs. Emmons,' he says. 'I never saw
such a hearty place.'
"I donno whether you've ever noticed the difference in the way women
bustle around? Most nice women do bustle when something comes up that
needs it. Some does it light and lifty, like fairies going around on
missions; and some does it kind of crackling and nervous, like goblins
on business. Mis' Emmons was the first kind, and it was real
contagious. You caught it yourself and begun pulling chairs around and
seeing to windows and sort of settling away down deep into the minute.
She begun doing that way now, seeing to the fire and the lamp-shade and
the sofa, and wanting everybody to be dry and comfortable, instant.
"'You are so good-natured to like my room,' she says. 'I furnished it
for ten cents--yes, not much more. The whole effect is just colour,' she
says. 'What I have to do without in quality I go and wheedle out of the
spectrum. What _should_ we do without the rainbow? And what in the world
am I going to put on that child?'
"Insley let Christopher down on the rug by the door, and there he stood,
dripping, patient, holding his paper bag, and not looking up and around
him, same as a child will in a strange room, but just looking hard at
the nice, red, warm blaze. Miss Sidney come and stooped over him, with
that same little way of touching him, like loving.
"'Let's go and be dry now,' she says, 'and then let's see what we can
find in the pantry.'
"The little fellow, he just laughed out, soft and delicious, with his
head turned away and without saying anything.
"'I never said such a successful thing,' says Miss Sidney, and led him
upstairs where we could hear Mis' Emmons bustling around cosey.
"Mr. Insley and I sat down by the fire. I remember I looked over towards
him and felt sort of nervous, he was so good looking and so silent. A
good-looking _talking_ man I ain't afraid of, because I can either
admire or despise him immediate, and either way it gives me something to
do answering back. But one that's still, it takes longer to make out,
and it don't give you no occupation for your impressions. And Insley,
besides being still, was so good looking that it surprised me every new
time I see him. I always wanted to say: Have you been looking like that
all the time since I last saw you, and how _do_ you keep it up?
"He had a face and a body that showed a good many men looking out of 'em
at you, and all of 'em was men you'd like to of known. There was
scholars that understood a lot, and gentlemen that acted easy, and
outdoor men that had pioneered through hard things and had took their
joy of the open. All of them had worked hard at him--and had give him
his strength and his merriness and his big, broad shoulders and his
nice, friendly boyishness, and his eyes that could see considerably
more than was set before them. By his own care he had knit his body
close to life, and I know he had knit his spirit close to it, too. As I
looked over at him that night, my being nervous sort of swelled up into
a lump in my throat and I wanted to say inside me: O God, ain't it nice,
ain't it nice that you've got some folks like him?
"He glanced over to me, kind of whimsical.
"'Are you in favour of folks or tombstones?' he asks, with his eyebrows
flickering up.
"'Me?' I says. 'Well, I don't want to be clannish, but I do lean a good
deal towards folks.'
"'You knew what I meant to-night?' he says.
"'Yes,' I answered, 'I knew.'
"'I thought you did,' he says grave.
"Then he lapsed into keeping still again and so did I, me through not
quite knowing what to say, and him--well, I wasn't sure, but I thought
he acted a good deal as if he had something nice to think about. I've
seen that look on people's faces sometimes, and it always makes me feel
a little surer that I'm a human being. I wondered if it was his new work
he was turning over, or his liking the child's being cared for, or the
mere nice minute, there by the grate fire. Then a door upstairs shut,
and somebody come down and into the room, and when he got up, his look
sort of centred in that new minute.
"It was Miss Sidney that come in, and she set down by the fire like
something pleased her.
"'Aunt Eleanor is going to decorate Christopher herself,' she says. 'She
believes that she alone can do whatever comes up in this life to be
done, and usually she's right.'
"Insley stood looking at her for a minute before he set down again. She
had her big black cloak off by then, and she was wearing a
dress-for-in-the-house that was all rosy. She wasn't anything of the
star any longer. She was something more than a star. I always think one
of the nicest commonplace minutes in a woman's everyday is when she
comes back from somewheres outside the house where she's been, and sets
down by the fire, or by a window, or just plain in the middle of the
room. They always talk about pigeons 'homing'; I wish't they kept that
word for women. It seems like it's so exactly what they _do_ do.
"'I love the people,' Miss Sidney went on, 'that always feel that
way--that if something they're interested in is going to be really well
done, then they must do it themselves.'
"Insley always knew just what anybody meant--I'd noticed that about
him. His mind never left what you'd said floating round, loose ends in
the room, without your knowing whether it was going to be caught and
tied; but he just nipped right onto your remark and _tied it in the
right place_.
"'I love them, too,' he says now. 'I love anybody who can really feel
responsibility, from a collie with her pups up. But then I'm nothing to
go by. I find I'm rather strong for a good many people that can't feel
it, too--that are just folks, going along.'
"I suppose he expected from her the nice, ladylike agreeing, same as
most women give to this sort of thing, just like they'd admit they're
fond of verbenas or thin soles. But instead of that, she caught fire.
Her look jumped up the way a look will and went acrost to his. I always
think I'd rather have folks say 'I know' to me, understanding, than to
just pour me out information, and that was what she said to him.
"'I know,' she says, 'on the train to-day--if you could have seen them.
Such dreadful-looking people, and underneath--the _giving-up-ness_. I
believe in them,' she added simple.
"When a thing you believe gets spoke by somebody that believes it, too,
it's like the earth moved round a little faster, and I donno but it
does. Insley looked for a minute like he thought so.
"'I believe in them,' he says; 'not the way I used to, and just because
I thought they must be, somehow, fundamentally decent, but because it's
true.'
"'I know just when I first knew that,' Miss Sidney says. 'It come to me,
of all places, in a subway train, when I was looking at a row of faces
across the car. Nobody, _nobody_ can look interesting in that row along
the side of a subway car. And then I saw....'
"She thought for a minute and shook her head.
"'I can't tell you,' she says, 'it sounds so little and--no account. It
was a little thing, just something that happened to a homely woman with
a homely man, in a hat like a pirate's. But it almost--let me in. I can
do it ever since--look into people, into, or through, or with ...' she
tries to explain it. Then her eyes hurried up to his face, like she was
afraid he might not be understanding. He just nodded, without looking at
her, but she knew that he knew what she meant, and that he meant it,
too.
" ... I thought it was wonderful to hear them. I felt like an old
mountain, or anything natural and real ancient, listening to the Song of
Believing, sung by two that's young and just beginning. We all sing it
sometime in our lives--or Lord grieve for them that never do--and I
might as well own up that I catch myself humming that same song a good
deal of the time, to keep myself a-going. But I love to hear it when
it's just begun.
"They was still talking when Mis' Emmons come downstairs with
Christopher. Land, land but the little chap looked dear, dragging along,
holding up a long-skirted lounging dress of Mis' Emmons's. I never had
one of them lounging dresses. There's a lot of common things that it
never seems to me I can buy for myself: a nice dressing-gown, a block of
black pins, a fancy-headed hat pin, and a lemon-squeezer. I always use a
loose print, and common pins, and penny black-headed hat pins, and go
around squeezing my lemons by hand. I donno why it is, I'm sure.
"'I'm--I'm--I'm--a little boy king!' Christopher stutters, all excited
and satisfied, while Insley was a-packing him in the Morris chair.
"'Rained on!' says Mis' Emmons, in that kind of dismay that's as pure
feminine as if it had on skirts. 'Water isn't a circumstance to what
that dear child was. He was saturated--bless him. He must have been out
for perfect hours.'
"Christopher, thinking back into the rain, mebbe, from the pleasantness
of that minute, smiled and took a long breath.
"'I walked from that other place,' he explains, important.
"Mis' Emmons knew he was hungry, and she took Miss Sidney and Insley off
to the kitchen to find something to eat, and left me with the little
fellow, me spreading out his clothes in front of the fire to dry. He set
real still, like being dry and being with somebody was all he wanted.
And of course that is a good deal.
"I don't always quite know how to start talking to a child. I'm always
crazy to talk with them, but I'm so afraid of that shy, grave,
criticizin' look they have. I feel right off like apologizing for the
silly question I've just asked them. I felt that way now when
Christopher looked at me, real dignified and wondering. 'What you going
to be when you grow up to be a man?' was what I had just asked him. And
yet I don't know what better question I could of asked him, either.
"'I'm goin' to have a cream-puff store, an' make it all light in the
window,' he answers ready.
"'All light in the window?' I says puzzled.
"'And I'm going to keep a church,' he goes on, 'and I'm going to make
nice, black velvet for their coffings.'
"I didn't know quite what to make of that, not being able to think back
very far into his mind. So I kept still a few minutes.
"'What was you doin' in the church?' he says to me, all at once.
"'I don't really know. Waiting for you to come, I guess, Christopher,' I
says.
"'_Was_ you?' he cried, delighted. 'Pretty soon I came!' He looked in
the fire, sort of troubled. 'Is God outdoors nights?' he says.
"I said a little something.
"'Well,' he says, 'I thought he was in the house by the bed when you say
your prayer. An' I thought he was in church. But I don't think he stays
in the dark, much.'
"'Mebbe you don't,' I says, 'but you wait for him in the dark, and mebbe
all of a sudden some night you can tell that something is there. And
just you wait for that night to come.'
"'That's a nice game,' says Christopher, bright. 'What game is that?'
"'I donno,' I says. 'Game of Life, I guess.'
"He liked the sound; and he set there--little waif, full of no supper,
saying it over like a chant:--
"'Game o' life--game o' life--game o' l-i-f-e--'
"Just at that minute I was turning his little pockets wrong side out to
dry them, and in one of them I see a piece of paper, all crumpled up and
wrinkled. I spread it out, and I see it had writing on. And I held it up
to the light and read it, read it through twice.
"'Christopher,' I says then, 'where did you get this piece of paper? It
was in your pocket.'
"He looked at it, blank, and then he remembered.
"'My daddy,' he says. 'My daddy told me to give it to folks. I forgot.'
"'To folks?' I says. 'To what folks?'
"'To whoever ask' me anything,' he answers. 'Is it a letter?' he ask'.
"'Yes,' I says, thoughtful, 'it's a letter.'
"'To tell me what to do?' he ask' me.
"'Yes,' I says, 'but more, I guess, to tell us what to do.'
"I talked with him a little longer, so's to get his mind off the paper;
and then I told him to set still a minute, and I slipped out to where
the rest was.
"The pantry had a close, spicey, foody smell of a pantry at night, when
every tin chest and glass jar may be full up with nice things to eat
that you'd forgot about--cocoanut and citron and cinnamon bark. In
grown-up folks one of the things that is the last to grow up is the
things a pantry in the evening promises. You may get over really liking
raisins and sweet chocolate; you may get to wanting to eat in the
evening things that you didn't use' to even know the names of and don't
know them now, and yet it never gets over being nice and eventive to go
out in somebody's pantry at night, especially a pantry that ain't your
own.
"'Put everything on a tray,' Mis' Emmons was directing them, 'and find
the chafing-dish and let's make it in there by Christopher. Mr. Insley,
can you make toast? Don't equivocate,' she says; '_can_ you make toast?
People fib no end over what they can make. I'm always bragging about my
omelettes, and yet one out of every three I make goes flat, and I know
it. And yet I brag on. Beans, buckwheat, rice--what do you want to
cream, Robin? Well, look in the store-room. There may be something
there. We must tell Miss Sidney about Grandma Sellers' store-room, Mr.
Insley,' she says, and then tells it herself, laughing like a girl, how
Grandma Sellers, down at the other end of Daphne Street, has got a
store-room she keeps full of staples and won't let her son's wife use a
thing out. 'I've been hungry,' Grandma Sellers says, 'and I ain't
ashamed of that. But if you knew how good it feels to have a still-room
stocked full, you wouldn't ask me to disturb a can of nothing. I want
them all there, so if I should want them.' 'She's like me,' Mis' Emmons
ends, 'I always want to keep my living-room table tidy, to have a place
in case I should want to lay anything down. And if I put anything on it,
I snatch it up, so as to have a place in case I want to lay anything
down.'
"They was all laughing when I went out into the kitchen, and I went up
to Mis' Emmons with the paper.
"'Read that,' I says.
"She done so, out loud--the scrawlin', downhill message:--
"'Keep him will you,' the paper said, 'I don't chuck him to get rid
of but hes only got me since my wifes dead and the drinks got me
again. Ive stood it quite awhile but its got me again so keep him
and oblidge. will send money to him to the P O here what I can
spare I aint chuckin him but the drinks got me again.
"'resp, his father.
"'P S his name is Christopher Bartlett he is a good boy his throat
gets sore awful easy.'
"When Mis' Emmons had got through reading, I remember Miss Sidney's face
best. It was so full of a sort of a leaping-up pity and wistfulness that
it went to your heart, like words. I knew that with her the minute
wasn't no mere thrill nor twitter nor pucker, the way sad things is to
some, but it was just a straight sounding of a voice from a place of
pain. And so it was to Insley. But Mis' Emmons, she never give herself
time to be swamped by anything without trying to climb out right while
the swamping was going on.
"'What'll we do?' she says, rapid. 'What in this world shall we do? Did
you ever hear of anything--well, I wish somebody would tell me what
we're going to do.'
"'Let's be glad for one thing,' says Allen Insley, 'that he's here with
you people to-night. Let's be glad of that first--that he's here with
you.'
"Miss Sidney looked away to the dark window.
"'That poor man,' she says. 'That poor father....'
"We talked about it a little, kind of loose ends and nothing to fasten
to, like you will. Mis' Emmons was the first to get back inside the
minute.
"'Well,' she says, brisk, 'do let's go in and feed the child while we
have him. Nobody knows when he's had anything to eat but those unholy
cream-puffs. Let's heat him some broth and let's carry in the things.'
"Back by the fire Christopher set doing nothing, but just looking in the
blaze like his very eyesight had been chilly and damp and needed seeing
to. He cried out jolly when he see all the pretty harness of the
chafing-dish and the tray full of promises.
"'Oh,' he cries, '_Robin!_'
"She went over to him, and she nestled him now like she couldn't think
of enough to do for him nor enough things to say to keep him company. I
see Insley watching her, and I wondered if it didn't come to him like it
come to me, that for the pure art of doing nothing so that it seems like
it couldn't be got along without, a woman--some women--can be commended
by heaven to a world that always needs that kind of doing nothing.
"'Children have a genius for getting rid of the things that don't
count,' Miss Sidney says. 'I love his calling me "Robin." Mustn't there
be some place where we don't build walls around our names?'
"Insley thought for a minute. 'You oughtn't to be called "Miss," and
you oughtn't to wear a hat,' he concluded, sober. 'Both of them make
you--too much _there_. They draw a line around you.'
"'I don't feel like Miss to myself,' she says, grave. 'I feel like
Robin. I believe I _am_ Robin!'
"And I made up my mind right then and there that, to myself anyway, I
was always going to call her Robin. It's funny about first names. Some
of them fit right down and snuggle up close to their person so that you
can't think of them apart. And some of them slip loose and dangle along
after their person, quite a ways back, so that you're always surprised
when now and then they catch up and get themselves spoke by someone. But
the name Robin just seemed to wrap Miss Sidney up in itself so that, as
she said, she _was_ Robin. I like to call her so.
"It was her that engineered the chafing-dish. A chafing-dish is a thing
I've always looked on a little askant. I couldn't cook with folks
looking at me no more than I could wash my face in company. I remember
one hot July day when there was a breeze in my front door, I took my
ironing-board in the parlor and tried to iron there. But land, I felt
all left-handed; and I know it would be that way if I ever tried to
cook in there, on my good rug. Robin though, she done it wonderful. And
pretty soon she put the hot cream gravy on some crumbled-up bread and
took it to Christopher, with a cup of broth that smelled like when they
used to say, 'Dinner's ready,' when you was twelve years old.
"He looked up at her eager. 'Can you cut it in squares?' he asked.
"'In what?' she asks him over.
"'Squares. And play it's molasses candy--white molasses candy?' he says.
"'Oh,' says Robin, 'no, not in squares. But let's play it's hot
ice-cream.'
"'_Hot ice-cream_,' he says, real slow, his eyes getting wide. To play
Little Boy King and have hot ice-cream was about as much as he could
take care of, in joy. Sometimes I get to wondering how we ever do
anything else except collect children together and give them nice little
simple fairylands. But while, on the sly, we was all watching to see
Christopher sink deep in the delight of that hot toothsome supper, he
suddenly lays down his spoon and stares over to us with wide eyes, eyes
that there wasn't no tears gathering in, though his little mouth was
quivering.
"'What is it--what, dear?' Robin asks, from her stool near his feet.
"'My daddy,' says the little boy. 'I was thinking if he could have some
this.'
"Robin touched her cheek down on his arm.
"'Blessed,' she says, 'think how glad he'd be to have you have some.
He'd want you to eat it--wouldn't he?'
"The child nodded and took up his spoon, but he sighed some. 'I wish't
he'd hurry,' he says, and ate, obedient.
"Robin looked up at us--I don't think a woman is ever so lovely as when
she's sympathizing, and it don't make much difference what it's over, a
sore finger or a sore heart, it's equally becoming.
"'I know,' she says to us, 'I know just the _place_ where that hurts. I
remember, when I was little, being in a house that a band passed, and
because mother wasn't there, I ran inside and wouldn't listen. It's such
a special kind of hurt....'
"From the end of the settle that was some in the shadow, Insley set
watching her, and he looked as if he was thinking just what I was
thinking: that she was the kind that would most always know just the
place things hurt. And I bet she'd know what to do--and a thousand kinds
of things that she'd go and do it.
"'O ...' Christopher says. 'I like this most next better than molasses
candy, cutted in squares. I do, Robin!' He looked down at her, his spoon
waiting. 'Is you that Robin Redbreast?' he inquired.
"'I'm any Robin you want me to be,' she told him. 'To-morrow we'll play
that, shall we?'
"'Am I here to-morrow? Don't I have to walk to-morrow?' he ask' her.
"'No, you won't have to walk to-morrow,' she told him.
"Christopher leaned back, altogether nearer to luxury than I guess he'd
ever been.
"'I'm a little boy king, and it's hot ice-cream, and I love _you_,' he
tops it off to Robin.
"She smiled at him, leaning on his chair.
"'Isn't it a miracle,' she says to us, 'the way we can call out--being
liked? We don't do something, and people don't pay any attention and
don't know the difference. Then some little thing happens, and there
they are--liking us, doing a real thing.'
"'I know it,' I says, fervent. 'Sometimes,' I says, 'it seems to me
wonderful cosey to be alive! I'm glad I'm it.'
"'So am I,' says Insley, and leaned forward. 'There's never been such a
time to be alive,' he says. 'Mrs. Emmons, why don't we ask Miss Sidney
for some plans for our plan?'
"Do you know how sometimes you'll have a number of floating ideas in
your mind--wanting to do this, thinking that would be nice, dreaming of
something else--and yet afraid to say much about it, because it seems
like the ideas or the dreams is much too wild for anybody else to have,
too? And then mebbe after a while, you'll find that somebody had the
same idea and dreamed it out, and died with it? Or somebody else tried
to make it go a little? Well, that was what begun to happen to me that
night while I heard Insley talk, only I see that my floating ideas, that
wan't properly attached to the sides of my head, was actually being
worked out here and there, and that Insley knew about them.
"I donno how to tell what my ideas was. I'd had them from time to time,
and a good many of us ladies had, only we didn't know what to do with
them. And an idea that you don't know what to do with is like a wild
animal out of its cage: there ain't no performance till it's adjusted.
For instance, when we'd wanted to pave Daphne Street and the whole town
council had got up and swung its arms over its head and said that having
an economical administration was better than paving--why, then us ladies
had all had the same idee about that.
"'Is the town run for the sake of being the town, with money in its
treasury, or is the town run for the folks in it?' I remember Mis'
Toplady asking, puzzled. 'Ain't the folks the town really?' she ask'.
'And if they are, why can't they pave themselves with their own money?
Don't that make sense?' she ask' us, and we thought it did.
"Us ladies had got Daphne Street paved, or at least it was through us
they made the beginning, but there was things we hadn't done. We was all
taking milk of Rob Henney that we knew his cow barns wasn't at all
eatable, but he was the only milk wagon, nobody else in town delivering,
so we kept on taking, but squeamish, squeamish. Then there was the
grocery stores, leaving their food all over the sidewalk, dust-peppered
and dirt-salted. But nobody liked to say anything to Silas Sykes that
keeps the post-office store, nor to Joe Betts, that his father before
him kept the meat market, being we all felt delicate, like at asking a
church member to come out to church. Then us ladies had bought a zinc
wagon and started it around to pick up the garbage to folks' doors, but
the second summer the council wouldn't help pay for the team, because it
was a saving council, and so the wagon was setting in a shed, with its
hands folded. Then there was Black Hollow, that we'd wanted filled up
with dirt instead of scummy water, arranging for typhoid fever and other
things, but the council having got started paving, was engaged in paving
the swamp out for miles, Silas Sykes's cousin being in the wooden block
business. And, too, us ladies was just then hopping mad over the doings
they was planning for the Fourth of July, that wasn't no more than
making a cash register of the day to earn money into. All these things
had been disturbing us, and more; but though we talked it over
considerable, none of us knew what to do, or whether anything could be.
It seemed as though every way we moved a hand, it hit out at the council
or else went into some business man's pocket. And not having anybody to
tell us what other towns were doing, we just set still and wished,
passive.
"Well, and that night, while I heard Insley talking, was the first I
knew that other towns had thought about these things, too, and was
beginning to stir and to stir things. Insley talked about it light
enough, laughing, taking it all casual on the outside, but underneath
with a splendid earnestness that was like the warp to his words. He
talked like we could pick Friendship Village up, same as a strand if we
wanted, and make it fine and right for weaving in a big pattern that
his eyes seemed to see. He talked like our village, and everybody's
village and everybody's city wasn't just a lot of streets laid down and
walls set up, and little families and little clubs and little separate
groups of folks organized by themselves. But he spoke like the whole
town was just one street and _no_ walls, and like every town was a piece
of the Big Family that lives on the same street, all around the world
and back again. And he seemed to feel that the chief thing all of us was
up to was thinking about this family and doing for it and being it, and
getting it to be the way it can be when we all know how. And he seemed
to think the things us ladies had wanted to do was some of the things
that would help it to be the way it can.
"When he stopped, Robin looked up at him from the hearth-rug: '"The
world is beginning,"' she quotes to him from somewheres; "'I must go and
help the king."'
"He nodded, looking down at her and seeing, as he must have seen, that
her face was all kindled into the same kind of a glory that was in his.
It was a nice minute for them, but I was so excited I piped right up in
the middle of it:--
"'Oh,' I says, '_them_ things! Was it them kind of things you meant
about in Sodality to-night that we'd ought to do? Why, us ladies has
wanted to do things like that, but we felt sort of sneaking about it and
like we was working against the council and putting our interests before
the town treasury--'
"'And of the cemetery,' he says.
"'Is _that_,' I ask' him, 'what you're professor of, over to Indian
Mound college?'
"'Something like that,' he says.
"'Nothing in a book, with long words and italics?' I ask' him.
"'Well,' he says, 'it's getting in books now, a little. But it doesn't
need any long words.'
"'Why,' I says, 'it's just being professor of human beings, then?'
"'Trying to be, perhaps,' he says, grave.
"'Professor of Human Beings,' I said over to myself; 'professor of being
human....'
"On this nice minute, the front door, without no bell or knock, opened
to let in Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, with a shawl over her head
and a tin can in her hand.
"'No, I won't set any, thanks,' she says. 'I just got to
thinking--mercy, no. Don't give me any kind of anything to eat any such
time of night as this. I should be up till midnight taking soda. That's
what ails folks' stomachs, my notion--these late lunches on nobody
knows what. No, I got to bed and I was just dropping off when I happened
to sense how wringing wet that child was, and that I betted he'd take
cold and have the croup in the night, and you wouldn't have no
remedy--not having any children, so. It rousted me right up wide awake,
and I dressed me and run over here with this. Here. Put some on a rag
and clap it on his chest if he coughs croupy. I donno's it would hurt
him to clap it on him, anyway, so's to be sure. No, I can't stop. It's
'way past my bed-time....'
"'There's lots of professors of being human, Miss Marsh,' Insley says to
me, low.
"Mis' Holcomb stood thinking a minute, brushing her lips with the fringe
of her shawl.
"'Mebbe somebody up to the Proudfits' would do something for him,' she
says. 'I see they're lit up. Who's coming?'
"'Mr. Alex Proudfit will be here to-morrow,' Mis' Emmons told her. 'He
has some people coming to him in a day or two, for a house party over
the Fourth.'
"'Will he be here so soon?' says Insley. 'I've been looking forward to
meeting him--I've a letter to him from Indian Mound.'
"'Whatever happens,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'I'll get up attic first thing
in the morning and find some old clothes for this dear child. I may be
weak in the pocket-book, but I'm strong on old duds.'
"Insley and I both said good night, so's to walk home with Mis' Holcomb,
and Christopher kissed us both, simple as belonging to us.
"'We had that hot ice-cream,' he announced to Mis' Holcomb.
"'The lamb!' says she, and turns her back, hasty.
"I wondered a little at Mis' Emmons not saying anything to her about the
letter we'd found, that made us know somebody would have to do
something. But just as we was starting out, Mis' Emmons says to me low,
'Don't let's say anything about his father yet. I have a plan--I want to
think it over first.' And I liked knowing that already she had a plan,
and I betted it was a plan that would be born four-square to its own
future.
"Insley stood holding the door open. The rain had stopped altogether
now, and the night was full of little things sticking their heads up in
deep grasses and beginning to sing about it. I donno about what, but
about something nice. And Insley was looking toward Robin, and I see
that all the ancestors he'd ever had was lingering around in his face,
like they knew about something he was just beginning to know about.
Something nice--nicer than the little outdoor voices.
"'Good night, Miss Sidney,' he says. 'And what a good night for
Christopher!' And he looked as if he wanted to add: 'And for me.'
"'Good night, Mis' Emmons,' I says. 'It's been an evening like a full
meal.'