"'I'm awful glad you did, too,' says J. Horace. 'I thought first it was awful lonesome here, but I guess—'
"'They're goin' to have music to-night,' says Minerva, irrelevant.
"'Cricky!' says the little photograph man.
"Minerva had her arm around a porch post and she sort of swung back and forth careless, and—'My!' she said, 'I just do love to go. Have you ever travelled anywheres?'
"'Texas an' through there,' he says. 'I'm goin' again some day, when—'
"'I'm goin' West now,' says Minerva. 'I just can't stand it long in one place, unless,' she added, 'it's awful nice.'
"I'd found my glove, but I recollect I stood still, staring out the door. I see it like I never see it before—They was living. Them two young things out there on my porch, and all the young folks of Friendship Village, they was just living—trying to find a future and a life of their own. They didn't know it. They thought what they wanted was a good time, like the pioneers thought they wanted adventure. But here they were, young pioneers of new villages, flocking together wherever they could, seeking each other out, just living. And us that knew, us that had had life, too, or else had missed it, we was just letting them live, haphazard. And us that had ought to of been mothers to the town young, no less than to our own young, had been leaving them live alone, on the streets and stairways and school entries of Friendship Village.
"I know I fair run along the street to the schoolhouse. It seemed as if I couldn't get there quick enough to begin the new way.
"The schoolhouse was lit up from cellar to garret and it looked sort of different and surprised at itself, and like it was sticking its head up. Maybe it sounds funny, but it sort of seemed to me the old brick building looked conscious, and like it had just opened its eyes and turned its face to something. Inside, the music was tuning up, the desks that was only part screwed down had been moved back; in one of the recitation-rooms we'd got the gas plates for the candy making, and Abagail was in there stirring up lemonade in a big crock, and the other ladies, with white aprons on, was bustling round seeing to cutting the cakes.
"It wasn't a good seven-thirty before they begun coming in, the girls nipping in pretty dresses, the boys awkward and grinning, school-girls, shop-girls, Mis' Sykes's Em'ly an' Abe Luck and everybody—they come from all directions that night, I guess, just to see what it was like.