I want to laugh yet, every time I think how Mis' Postmaster Sykes looked at me.
"Colored!" she says. "You mean—you can't mean—"
"No," I says, "nothing dangerous. It's going to give us a chance to see that what we've always said could be true sometime, away far off, is true of some of them now."
Mis' Sykes sprang up and began walking the floor.
"A family like that in Oldmoxon House—and my nearest neighbors," says she, wild. "It's outrageious—outrageious."
I don't use my words very good, but I know better than to say "outrageious." I don't know but it was her pronouncing it that way, in such a cause, that made me so mad.
"Mis' Sykes," I says, "Mis' Fernandez has got a better education than either you or I. She's a graduate of a Southern college, and her two children have been to colleges that you and I have never seen the inside of and never will. And her husband is a college professor, up here to study for a degree that I don't even know what the letters stands for. In what," says I, "consists your and my superiority to that woman?"
"My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "ain't you got no sense of fitness to you. Ain't she black?"
"Her skin ain't the same color as ours, you're saying," I says. "Don't it seem to you that that reason had ought to make a cat laugh?"
Mis' Sykes fair wheeled on me. "Calliope Marsh," says she, "the way you set your opinions against established notions is an insult to your kind."