Her sunken cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowed with light as she gazed about her.
“When I see myself around the house how I fixed it up with my own hands, I forget I’m only a nobody. It makes me feel I’m also a person like Mrs. Preston. It lifts me with high thoughts.”
“Why didn’t you marry yourself to a millionaire? You always want to make yourself like Mrs. Preston who got millions laying in the bank.”
“But Mrs. Preston does make me feel that I’m alike with her,” returned Hanneh Hayyeh, proudly. “Don’t she talk herself out to me like I was her friend? Mrs. Preston says this war is to give everybody a chance to lift up his head like a person. It is to bring together the people on top who got everything and the people on the bottom who got nothing. She’s been telling me about a new word—democracy. It got me on fire. Democracy means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody alike.”
“Och! Stop your dreaming out of your head. Close up your mouth from your foolishness. Women got long hair and small brains,” he finished, muttering as he went to bed.
At the busy gossiping hour of the following morning when the butcher-shop was crowded with women in dressing-sacks and wrappers covered over with shawls, Hanneh Hayyeh elbowed her way into the clamorous babel of her neighbors.
“What are you so burning? What are you so flaming?”
“She’s always on fire with the wonders of her son.”
“The whole world must stop still to listen to what news her son writes to her.”
“She thinks her son is the only one soldier by the American army.”