“That’s so,” she says, “ain’t it? The two fits together like a covered bake-dish.”
“Ain’t you ’fraid he’ll shoot the oven door down if you don’t let him out pitty quick?” says Donnie, trying to see how near he could get his ear to the crack to hear that “Hurrah.”
Four days the little boy done that, stayed with me as contented as a kitten while his father went agenting; and then the fifth day he had to take him with him, because there come on what I’d been getting the cakes for—the quarterly meeting of the Go-lightly club.
The Go-lightly club is sixteen Red Barns ladies—and me—that’s all passed the sixty-year-old mark, and has had to begin to go lightly. We picked the name as being so literal, grievous-true as to our powers and, same time, airy and happy sounding, just like we hope we’ll be clear up to the last of the last of us. We had a funny motto and, those days, it use’ to be a secret. We’d lit on it when we was first deciding to have the club.
“What do we want a club for anyhow?” old Mis’ Lockmeyer had said, that don’t really enjoy anything that she ain’t kicked out at first.
“Why,” says little Mis’ Pettibone, kind of gentle and final, “just to kind of make life nice.”
“Well,” says Mis’ Lockmeyer, “we got to go awful light on it, our age.”
And we put both them principles into our constitution:
“Name: The name of this club shall be the Go-lightly club, account of the character of its members.
“Object: The object of this club shall be to make life nice.