"I'll never forget how sweet and shy and unexpected and young Letty looked, but she answered, as brave as brave:—
"'Otie Daniel is sick,' she said, 'and all us women can do is to carry him broth and bread and nurse him. It's only the men that can bring about the things to make him well. And they haven't done it. It's been the women who have been urging it—and not getting it done. Wasn't it our work to do, too?'
"I see Elbert looking at her—like he just couldn't bear to have her speak so, like some men can't. And I guess he spoke out in answer before he meant to:—
"'But let them do it womanly, Letty,' he said, 'like your mother did and my mother did.'
"Letty turned and looked Elbert Sykes straight in the face:—
"'Womanly!' she says. 'What is there womanly about my bathing and feeding a child inside four clean walls, if dirt and bad food and neglect are outside for him? Will you tell me if there is anything more womanly than my right to help make the world as decent for my children as I would make my own home?'
"I looked at Letty, and looked; and I see with a thrill I can't tell you about how Letty seemed. For she seemed the way she had that morning on my kitchen stoop, when she spoke of her children and when I felt like I'd ought to turn away—the way I'd used to when my mother showed me my baby dress and told me who it would be for. Only now—only now, somehow, I didn't want to turn away. Somehow I wanted to keep right on looking at Letty, like Elbert was looking. And I see what he see. How Letty was what she'd said that morning that she was—and that I was—and that we all was: A mother, then and there, whether she ever had any children or not. And she was next door to owning up to it right there before them all and before Elbert. We didn't speak so when I was a girl. We didn't own up, out loud, that we ever thought anything about what we was for. But now, when I heard Letty do it....
" ... Now, when I heard Letty do it, all to once, I looked into a window of the world. And instead of touching hands like I had with the women that use' to be, I looked off and off down all the time there's going to be, and for a minute I touched, tip-fingers, the hands of the other women that's coming towards me; and out of places inside of me that I didn't know before had eyes, I see them, mothers to the whole world, inside their four walls and out. And they wasn't coming with poultices and bread and broth in their hands, to patch up what had been left undone; nor with the keys to schoolhouses that they'd got open by scheming; nor with newspapers full of health that they'd had to run down back alleys to sell; nor national holidays that they'd got a-hold of through sheer accident; nor yet with nice new headstones for cemetery improvements on the dead and gone—no, sir, their hands wasn't occupied with any of these ways of serving that they'd schemed for and stole. But their hands—was in men's hands, closer and nearer than they'd ever been before. And their eyes was lit up with a look that was a new look, and that give new life to the old original left-over blaze. And I looked across to that row of tired men, not so very much dressed up, and I thought:—
"'You're the men of this world and we're the women. And there ain't no more thrilling fact in this universe, save one, save one: And that's that we're all human beings. That your job and ours is to make the world ready for the folks that are to come, and to make the folks that come fit to live in that new world. And yet over there by Black Hollow one of our children is dying from something that was your job and ours to do, and we didn't take hold of hands and do it!'
"'Oh, Letty!' I says out. 'And Silas and all of you! Let's pretend, just for a minute, that we was all citizens and equal. And let's figure out things for Otie, just like we had the right!'