"'I'm a little boy king, and it's hot ice-cream, and I love you,' he tops it off to Robin.
"She smiled at him, leaning on his chair.
"'Isn't it a miracle,' she says to us, 'the way we can call out—being liked? We don't do something, and people don't pay any attention and don't know the difference. Then some little thing happens, and there they are—liking us, doing a real thing.'
"'I know it,' I says, fervent. 'Sometimes,' I says, 'it seems to me wonderful cosey to be alive! I'm glad I'm it.'
"'So am I,' says Insley, and leaned forward. 'There's never been such a time to be alive,' he says. 'Mrs. Emmons, why don't we ask Miss Sidney for some plans for our plan?'
"Do you know how sometimes you'll have a number of floating ideas in your mind—wanting to do this, thinking that would be nice, dreaming of something else—and yet afraid to say much about it, because it seems like the ideas or the dreams is much too wild for anybody else to have, too? And then mebbe after a while, you'll find that somebody had the same idea and dreamed it out, and died with it? Or somebody else tried to make it go a little? Well, that was what begun to happen to me that night while I heard Insley talk, only I see that my floating ideas, that wan't properly attached to the sides of my head, was actually being worked out here and there, and that Insley knew about them.
"I donno how to tell what my ideas was. I'd had them from time to time, and a good many of us ladies had, only we didn't know what to do with them. And an idea that you don't know what to do with is like a wild animal out of its cage: there ain't no performance till it's adjusted. For instance, when we'd wanted to pave Daphne Street and the whole town council had got up and swung its arms over its head and said that having an economical administration was better than paving—why, then us ladies had all had the same idee about that.
"'Is the town run for the sake of being the town, with money in its treasury, or is the town run for the folks in it?' I remember Mis' Toplady asking, puzzled. 'Ain't the folks the town really?' she ask'. 'And if they are, why can't they pave themselves with their own money? Don't that make sense?' she ask' us, and we thought it did.