“And she don't like cats.”
“Never mind. Now you go.”
Jim stood up. There was a curious change in his rosy, child-like face. There was a species of quickening. He looked at once older and more alert. His friend's words had charged him as with electricity. When he went down the street he looked taller.
Amanda Bennet and Alma Beecher, sitting sewing at their street windows, made this mistake.
“That isn't Uncle Jim,” said Amanda. “That man is a head taller, but he looks a little like him.”
“It can't be Uncle Jim,” agreed Alma. Then both started.
“It is Uncle Jim, and he is coming here,” said Amanda.
Jim entered. Nobody except himself, his nieces, and Joe Beecher ever knew exactly what happened, what was the aspect of the door-mat erected to human life, of the worm turned to menace. It must have savored of horror, as do all meek and downtrodden things when they gain, driven to bay, the strength to do battle. It must have savored of the god-like, when the man who had borne with patience, dignity, and sorrow for them the stings of lesser things because they were lesser things, at last arose and revealed himself superior, with a great height of the spirit, with the power to crush.
When Jim stopped talking and went home, two pale, shocked faces of women gazed after him from the windows. Joe Beecher was sobbing like a child. Finally his wife turned her frightened face upon him, glad to have still some one to intimidate.
“For goodness' sake, Joe Beecher, stop crying like a baby,” said she, but she spoke in a queer whisper, for her lips were stiff.