And then I said my creed:
“O, when we get to working as hard to keep things from happening as we work when it’s happened, won’t living be fun?”
“Well, of course we couldn’t prevent floods,” says Mis’ Merriman, “and them natural things.”
“Shucks!” I says, simple. “If we knew as much about frosts and hurricanes as we do about comets—we’d show you. And do you think it’s any harder to bank in a river than it is to build a subway—if there was the same money in it for the company?”
Just then the noon whistles blew—all of ’em together, round-house and brick-yard, so’s you couldn’t tell ’em apart; and the sun come shining down on us all, going along on Daphne Street. And all of a sudden Mis’ Merriman looked over to me and smiled, and so I done to her, and I saw that our morning together and our feeling together had made us forget whatever there’d been between us to forget about. And I ain’t ever in my life felt so kin to folks. I felt kinner than I knew I was.
That night, tired as I was, I walked over to see Mis’ Sykes’s night-blooming cereus—I don’t see enough pretty things to miss one when I can get to it. And there, sitting on Mis’ Sykes’s front porch, with her shoes slipped off to rest her feet, was Mis’ Holcomb-that-was-Mame Bliss.
“Mis’ Sykes is out getting in a few pieces she washed out and forgot,” says Mame, “and the Marshalls is all down town in a body sending a postal to say they’re safe. Silas went too.”
“The Marshalls!” says I. “Are they here?”
Mame nodded. “Silas asked ’em,” she says. “Him and Bitty’ve been looking over grocery stock catalogues. Silas’s been advising him some.”