And I says: “And you’d let me come to you if I need a friend, wouldn’t you? I thought so. Well, now, here’s three of us good friends, and showing it only when it’s needed. Let’s us three go and set down together for refreshments, sha’n’t we?”
Lisbeth looked up at me like a dog that I’d patted. I donno but Mis’ Graves thought I was impertinent. I donno but I was. But I like to be—like that. Oh, anything but the “protected” women that go cooing and humming and pooring around a girl like Lisbeth, and doing it in the name of friendliness. Friendliness isn’t that. And if you don’t know what it is different from that, then go out into the crowd of the world, stripped and hungry and dumb and by yourself, and wait till it comes to you. It’ll come! God sees to that. And it’s worth everything. For if you die without finding it out, you die without knowing life.
After that day, none of us invited Lisbeth in company. We see it was kinder not to.
But the little boy—the little boy. There wasn’t any way of protecting him. And it never entered Lisbeth’s head at first that she was going to be struck at through him. She sent him to Sunday-school, and everything was all right there, except Mis’ Graves taking her little boy out of the class he was in, and Lisbeth didn’t know that. Then she sent him to day school, in the baby room. And Mis’ Sykes’s little grandchild went there—Artie Barling; and I guess he must have heard his mother and Mis’ Sykes talking—anyway at recess he shouts out when they was playing:
“Everybody that was born in the house be on my side!”
They all went rushing over to his side, Christopher too.
“Naw!” Artie says to him. “Not youse. Youse was borned outside. My gramma says so.”
So Chris went home, crying, with that. And then Lisbeth begun to understand. I went in to see her one afternoon, and found her working out in the little patch of her mother’s garden. When she see me she set down by the hollyhocks she was transplanting and looked up at me, just numb.
“Miss Marsh,” she says, “it’s God punishing me, I s’pose, but——”
“No, Lisbeth,” I says. “No. The real punishment ain’t this. This is just folks punishing you. Don’t never mistake the one for the other, will you?”