"I don't know what they're for," she said. "I found them when I housecleaned, and there was so many of 'em I hated to throw 'em away. Of course I'll never use 'em, but they look sort of nice in there—so white and a glass cork—don't you think so?"
She walked with me across the lawn and stood brooding, one hand across her mouth, looking down at the disturbance—so slight!—in the grass where we had laid the bird. And on her face was the look which, each time that I saw it there, drew me nearer to her.
"'Seems as if I'd ought to be there to the hospital," she said, "doing what I can. Do you s'pose they'll take good care of him? I guess they know more about it than I do. But if I could get hold of him in my arms it seems as if I could help 'em."
I said what I could, and she went away to her house. And for the first time since I had known her she did not seem put upon to be back at some employment. These times of unwonted idleness are terrible to witness. I remember a farmer whom I once saw in the afternoon, dressed in his best, waiting in the kitchen for the hour of his daughter's wedding, and I wondered that the great hands did not work of their own will. The lost aspect of certain men on holidays, the awful inactivity of the day of a funeral, the sad idleness of old age, all these are very near to the tragedy of negation. Work, the positive, the normal, the joyous, is like an added way of being. I thought that I would never again marvel at my neighbour for being always on the edge of flight to some pressing occupation. Why should she not be so?—with all that there is to be done. Whether we rush about, or conceal the need and rush secretly, is a detail of our breeding; the need is to get things done, to become by doing. And while for myself I would prefer the accomplishment of not seeming to hurry, as another is accomplished at the harp, yet I own that I would cheerfully forego the pretty grace rather than find myself without some slight degree of the robust proficiency of getting things done.
"If you're born a picture in a book," Calliope once said, "it's all very well to set still on the page an' hold your hands. But if you're born anyways human at all, stick up your head an' start out for somewhere."
My neighbour rarely comes to my house. And therefore, though she is to me so familiar a figure in her garden, when next morning I found her awaiting me in my sitting room, she seemed strange to me. Perhaps, too, she was really strange to me that day.
"My baby died," she said.
She stood there looking at me, and I knew that what she said was true, but it seemed to me for a moment that I could not have it so.
"He died yesterday in the evening," she told me. "I just heard this morning, when the telegraph office opened. I dressed myself to go after him, but he's gone."