"'Shucks!' I says only. 'Look up at the stars. I don't believe it.'
"He laughed a little, and he did look up at them, but still I knew how he felt. And even the stars that night looked awful detached and able to take care of themselves. And they were a-shining down on the Plank Road that would get to be Daphne Street and go about its business of leading to private homes—private homes. The village, that little cluster of lights ahead there, seemed just shutting anybody else out, going its own way, kind of mocking anybody for any idea of getting really inside it. It was plain enough that Insley had nothing to hope for from Alex Proudfit. And Alex's serene sureness that Nature needed nobody to help, his real self-satisfied looking on at processes which no man could really hurry up—my, but they made you feel cheap, and too many of yourself, and like none of you had a license to take a-hold. For a second I caught myself wondering. Maybe Nature—stars and streets and processes—could work it out without us.
"Something come against my foot. I pushed at it, and then bent over and touched it. It was warm and yieldy, and I lifted it up. And it was a puppy that wriggled its body unbelievable and flopped on to my arm its inch and a quarter of tail.
"'Look at,' I says to Insley, which, of course, he couldn't do; but I put the little thing over into his hands.
"'Well, little brother,' says he. 'Running away?'
"We was just in front of the Cadozas', a tumble-down house halfway between Proudfit House and the village. It looked like the puppy might belong there, so we turned in there with it. I'd always sort of dreaded the house, setting in back among lilacs and locusts and never lit up. When I stopped to think of it, I never seemed to remember much about those lilacs and locusts blooming—I suppose they did, but nobody caught them at it often. Some houses you always think of with their lilacs and locusts and wisteria and hollyhocks going all the time; and some you never seem to connect up with being in bloom at all. Some houses you always seem to think of as being lit up to most of their windows, and some you can't call to mind as showing any way but dark. The Cadozas' was one of the unblossoming, dark kind, and awful ramshackle, besides. I always use' to think it looked like it was waiting for some kind of happening, I didn't know what. And sometimes when I come by there in the dark, I used to think: It ain't happened yet.
"We went around to the back door to rap, and Mis' Cadoza opened it—a slovenly looking woman she is, with no teeth much, and looking like what hair she's got is a burden to her. I remember how she stood there against a background of mussy kitchen that made you feel as if you'd turned something away wrong side out to where it wasn't meant to be looked at.
"'Is it yours, Mis' Cadoza?' I says, Insley holding out the puppy.
"'Murder, it's Patsy,' says Mis' Cadoza. 'Give 'm here—he must of followed Spudge off. Oh, it's you, Miss Marsh.'
"Over by the cook stove in the corner I see past her to something that made me bound to go inside a minute. It was a bed, all frowzy and tumbled, and in it was laying a little boy.