"But he don't want to be honored!" I cried. "He wants to be neighbored—the way anybody does when they're worth it."
"Mis' Sykes says," says Mis' Toplady, "that we mustn't forget what is fitting and what isn't."
And Mis' Holcomb added: "She carried it off grand. Everybody thinks just the way she does."
My reception-surprise cake stood ready on the table. After a while, we three sat down around it, and cut it for ourselves. But all the while we ate, that soldier's music was still playing for me; and what hadn't happened was more real for me than the things that were true.
THE BROTHER-MAN[9]
When the New Race comes—those whom Hudson calls "that blameless, spiritualized race that is to follow"—surely they will look back with some sense of actual romance upon the faint tapers which we now light, both individual and social tapers. They will make their allowance for us, as do we for the ambiguous knights of chivalry. And while the New Race will shudder at us—at our disorganization with its war, its poverty and its other crime—yet I think that they will love us a little for our ineffectual ministries, as already we love them for exceeding our utmost dream.
Don't you love a love-story; starting right before your eyes as casual as if it was preserves getting cooked or parsley coming up? It doesn't often happen to me to see one start, but once it did. It didn't start like anything at all that was going to be anything, but just still and quiet, same as the stars come out. I guess that's the way most great things move, isn't it? Still and quiet, like stars coming out. Or similar to stars.
It was the time of the Proudfits' big what-they-called week-end parties, and it was the Saturday of the biggest of them, when a dozen city people came down to Friendship Village for the lark. And with them was to come a Piano Lady and a Violin Man—and a man I'd known about in the magazines, a Novel-and-Poem Man that writes the kind of things that gets through all the walls between you and the world, so's you can talk to everything there is. I was crazy to see the Novel-and-Poem Man—from behind somewheres, though, so's he wouldn't see me and look down on me. And when Miss Clementina Proudfit asked me to bring her out some things from the city Saturday night, chocolate peppermints and red candles and like that, and said she'd send the automobile to the train for me to fetch up the things and see the decorations, I was real pleased. But I was the most excited about maybe seeing the Poem-and-Novel Man.