"Us ladies had got Daphne Street paved, or at least it was through us they made the beginning, but there was things we hadn't done. We was all taking milk of Rob Henney that we knew his cow barns wasn't at all eatable, but he was the only milk wagon, nobody else in town delivering, so we kept on taking, but squeamish, squeamish. Then there was the grocery stores, leaving their food all over the sidewalk, dust-peppered and dirt-salted. But nobody liked to say anything to Silas Sykes that keeps the post-office store, nor to Joe Betts, that his father before him kept the meat market, being we all felt delicate, like at asking a church member to come out to church. Then us ladies had bought a zinc wagon and started it around to pick up the garbage to folks' doors, but the second summer the council wouldn't help pay for the team, because it was a saving council, and so the wagon was setting in a shed, with its hands folded. Then there was Black Hollow, that we'd wanted filled up with dirt instead of scummy water, arranging for typhoid fever and other things, but the council having got started paving, was engaged in paving the swamp out for miles, Silas Sykes's cousin being in the wooden block business. And, too, us ladies was just then hopping mad over the doings they was planning for the Fourth of July, that wasn't no more than making a cash register of the day to earn money into. All these things had been disturbing us, and more; but though we talked it over considerable, none of us knew what to do, or whether anything could be. It seemed as though every way we moved a hand, it hit out at the council or else went into some business man's pocket. And not having anybody to tell us what other towns were doing, we just set still and wished, passive.
"Well, and that night, while I heard Insley talking, was the first I knew that other towns had thought about these things, too, and was beginning to stir and to stir things. Insley talked about it light enough, laughing, taking it all casual on the outside, but underneath with a splendid earnestness that was like the warp to his words. He talked like we could pick Friendship Village up, same as a strand if we wanted, and make it fine and right for weaving in a big pattern that his eyes seemed to see. He talked like our village, and everybody's village and everybody's city wasn't just a lot of streets laid down and walls set up, and little families and little clubs and little separate groups of folks organized by themselves. But he spoke like the whole town was just one street and no walls, and like every town was a piece of the Big Family that lives on the same street, all around the world and back again. And he seemed to feel that the chief thing all of us was up to was thinking about this family and doing for it and being it, and getting it to be the way it can be when we all know how. And he seemed to think the things us ladies had wanted to do was some of the things that would help it to be the way it can.
"When he stopped, Robin looked up at him from the hearth-rug: '"The world is beginning,"' she quotes to him from somewheres; "'I must go and help the king."'
"He nodded, looking down at her and seeing, as he must have seen, that her face was all kindled into the same kind of a glory that was in his. It was a nice minute for them, but I was so excited I piped right up in the middle of it:—
"'Oh,' I says, 'them things! Was it them kind of things you meant about in Sodality to-night that we'd ought to do? Why, us ladies has wanted to do things like that, but we felt sort of sneaking about it and like we was working against the council and putting our interests before the town treasury—'
"'And of the cemetery,' he says.
"'Is that,' I ask' him, 'what you're professor of, over to Indian Mound college?'
"'Something like that,' he says.
"'Nothing in a book, with long words and italics?' I ask' him.
"'Well,' he says, 'it's getting in books now, a little. But it doesn't need any long words.'