"It's my hour," says I, and I started. But it come to me that that wasn't the way Mr. Ember would have thought anybody ought to answer, and I felt kind of sick. I thought, How was I going to remember to do all the ways I knew he'd want?
It took me more than an hour to walk it. It was 'most six o'clock when I finally turned in the little street, just a block long, where he lived. My heart begun to beat, while I walked along slow, looking at the numbers. It come to me that maybe he wouldn't be glad to see me.
Sixteen ... eighteen ... twenty-two ... twenty-four, and that was his. It had a high brick fence—I could just see the roof over it—and a little picket gate standing open. I went along a short walk with green and yellow bushes on each side to a low porch with a door, that was standing open, too. And on the door was two cards: "Mr. Arthur Gordon" was on one. The other was his. Below them it said: "Visitors Enter."
So I went in, the way it said, through a low, bare, dim hall, and through a door on the right to a little room; and beyond was a big room, with a queer, sloping window all over the ceiling. The room had pictures on the walls. And it was full of folks.
I stood by the door looking for him. It didn't seem possible that we could meet here, now, when I'd left him such a little while ago, there in Twiney's pasture. There was a good many different kinds of men, most of them smiling. They were looking at the pictures, or drinking from cups round a white table. I looked at them first, one after another; but none of them was him.
Then I begun noticing the women. They looked like the kind I'd seen in the Weekly, Saturdays, when there was pictures. They were all light-colored, with dresses that you couldn't tell how they were made, and hair that you couldn't remember how it was done up, and soft voices that went up and down, different from any I'd ever heard. I could hear what some of them near me were saying, but there was none of it that I could understand, nor what it was about, nor what the names meant. And all of a sudden I see through it: These folks must all have done the things he had done—Asia, Europe, volcanoes—and they could talk about it his way. These were the kind of people he was used to.
Right near me was a woman in a dress that looked like I've seen the clouds look like, all showing through pink, with a hat like I'd never seen except once in a window when I was waiting for Mother and her teeth. I remember just what the woman said—I stood saying it over, like when I was learning a piece for elocution class, home. She says:
"I beg your pardon? But I fancy Mr. Ember would call that effect far from artificial...."
They walked by me. I stood there, saying over and over what she had just said about Mr. Ember. I didn't know what it meant, but it made me remember something. It made me remember the way I'd talked to him that morning, and the song I'd sung him, running backward on the road and trying to flirt with him; and that about his not giving me his right name.