“I was just goin’ to see you, Miss Marsh,” she says. “I got kind o’ lonesome and I thought I’d bring you over a begonia slip and set a while.”
“I’m sorry, Bess,” I says. “I’m going to a meeting.”
“What kind of meetin’?” she says. “P’litical?”
“Yes,” I says, “something like that.” And that was true, of course, being politics is so often carried on by private charity from the candidates.
“I’d kind of like to go to a meeting again,” she says, wistful. “I sung to revival meetings for a month once, when I was a girl.”
“I guess you wouldn’t like this one,” I says. “Come to see me to-morrow and I’ll tell you about it.”
And then I went up-stairs and left her standing there on the sidewalk, and I felt kind of ashamed and sneaking. I didn’t know why. But I says to myself, comforting, that she’d probably of broke out and sung in the middle of the meeting, if she had come. Her head ain’t right, like the most of ours; but hers takes noisy forms, so you notice more.
Eleven of us turned out to the meeting, which was a pretty good proportion, there being only fifteen hundred living in Friendship Village all together. Silas was in the chair, formal as a funeral.
“The idear, as I understand it,” says Silas, when the meeting was open, “is to get some Charity going. We’d ought to organize.”
“And then what?” asks Mis’ Toplady.