"Established notions," I says over after her. "'Established notions.' That's just it. And who is it, of us two, that's being insulting to their kind now, Mis' Sykes?"
She was looking out the window, with her lips close-pressed and a thought between her narrowed eye-lids.
"I'll rejoin 'em—or whatever it is you call it," she says. "I'll rejoin 'em from living in that house next to me."
"Mis' Sykes!" says I. "But their piano and their book-cases and their name are just the same as yesterday. You know yourself how you said folks's furniture expressed them. And it does—so be they ain't using left-overs the way I am. I tell you, I've talked with her, and I know. Or rather I kept still while she told me things about Venice and Granada where she'd been and I hadn't. You've got all you thought you had in that house, and education besides. Are you the Christian woman, Mis' Sykes, to turn your nose up at them?"
"Don't throw my faith in my face," says she, irritable.
"Well," I says, "I won't twit on facts. But anybody'd think the Golden Rule's fitted neat onto some folks to deal with, and is left flap at loose ends for them that don't match our skins. Is that sense, or ain't it?"
"It ain't the skin," she says. "Don't keep harping on that. It's them. They're different by nature."
Then she says the great, grand motto of the little thin slice of the human race that's been changed into superiority.
"You can't change human nature!" says she, ticking it out like a clock.
"Can't you?" says I. "Can't you? I'm interested. If that was true, you and I would be swinging by our tails, this minute, sociable, from your clothes-line."