"Pardon me," somebody near me said, "I wonder if I may serve you in any way?"
I didn't half see the man who spoke to me. I just shook my head, and slipped out the door and out of the little yard.
CHAPTER V
It was that night that I begun this book. I'd brought in a loaf of bread and a little warming pan and a can of baked beans. We het the beans over the gas-jet and made a good supper—the water in the wash pitcher was all right to drink. Then Mis' Bingy went to bed with the baby, and I got out the paper I'd fixed, and I started. It seemed as though I must. I had the feeling that I wanted to get out from the place I was in. Home, when I felt like that, I used to sweep the parlor or shampoo my hair, or try to get Father to leave me earn some money, helping him. Once I took my egg money and started lessons on our organ. But such things don't get you anywheres. And it seemed as though the book would help.
I didn't know anything to write about, only just me. It come to me that I ought to tell about me. But nothing worth writing had ever happened to me till just that morning. So I started in, and wrote near all night—down to the part where we got to the city. The gas smelled bad. I always remember that night. Before I knew it, it was getting light in the window. Then I put up the paper and crawled over back of Mis' Bingy and the baby, and went to sleep. And when I went to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, the same thing was in my head right along—that mebbe I could get to be enough different so's I could see him again, some day. Because I knew I wasn't never going to let him see me again while I was the way I was now. But I wondered how to get different.
"Mis' Bingy," I says next morning, "how do folks get different?"
"Hard work and trouble, mostly," she says.
"I don't mean backward," I says. "I mean frontward."