"'I heard he did,' said Mame, short. 'Those was the days before things was called by their true names in politics and in graft and like that.'
"'I'm sure,' says Mis' Merriman, her voice slipping, 'Grandfather Merriman was an angel in heaven to his family. And he started the very Cemetery by bein' buried in it first himself, and he took a front lot—'
"'Ladies, ladies,' says Mis' Sykes, stern, 'we ain't votin' yet. Has anybody got anything else to offer? Let the discussion be free.'
"'What do we get a monument for, anyway?' says Mis' Toplady, hemming peaceful. 'Why don't we stick the money onto the new iron fence for Cemetery, same as we've been trying to do for years?'
"'That's what I was thinking,' says Abagail Arnold, smiling. 'Whenever I make one of my layer cakes for Sodality Annual, and frost it white and make mounds of frosted nuts on top, I always wish Cemetery had a fence around so's I could make a frosting one on the edge of the cake, appropriate.'
"'Why, but my land, Abagail,' says Mis' Holcomb, 'can't you see the differ'nce between workin' for a dead iron fence and working for the real, right down Dead that once was the living? Where's your humanity, I'd like to know, and your loyalty to Friendship Village inhabitants that was, that you set the old iron fence over against 'em. What's a fence beside folks?'
"All this time Mis' Emmons, there in the front parlour, had just sat still, stitching away on some little garment or other, but now she looked up quick, as if she was going to speak. She even begun to speak with a 'Madame President' that covered up several excited beginnings. But as she done so, I looked through the folding doors and see her catch sight of somebody out in the street. And I looked out the bay-window in the back parlour and I see who it was: it was a man, carefully guiding a little bit of a man who was walking on the flat board top of the Sykes's fence. So, instead of speaking formal, all Mis' Emmons done was to make a little motion towards the window, so that her contribution to the debating was nothing but—
"'Madame President—look.'
"We all looked, them in the out-of-range corners of the room getting up and holding their work in their aprons, and peering past; and us in the back parlour tried for glimpses out the side bay-window, past Mis' Sykes's big sword fern. And so the most of us see Insley walking with Christopher, who was footing it very delicate and grave, picking out his places to step as if a real lot depended on it.
"'That's Chris,' says Mis' Emmons, simple, 'that's come to us.' And you'd of said she hardly spoke the 'us' real conscious of herself. She looked round at us all. 'Let's have him in for a minute,' she says.