"What's he like, Miss Clementina?" I ask' her. "When I hear his name I feel like when I hear the President's. Or even more that way."
"I've never met him," she says. "Mother knows him—he's her lion, not mine."
"He writes lovely things," I says, "things that makes you feel like everybody's way of doing is only lukewarm, and like you could just bring yourself to a boil to do good and straighten things out in the world, no matter what the lukewarm-way folks thought."
Miss Clementina looked over to me with a wonderful way she had—beautiful face and beautiful eyes softening to Summer.
"I know—know," she says; "I dread meeting him, for fear he doesn't mean it."
I knew what she meant. You can mean a thing you write in a book, or that you say in talk, or for other folks to do. But meaning it for living it—that's different.
I came out from the city that night on the accommodation, tired to death and loaded down with bundles for everybody in Friendship Village. Folks used to send into town by me for everything but stoves and wagons, though I wouldn't buy anything there except what you can't buy in the village: lamb's-wool for comforters, and cut-glass and baby-pushers, and shrimps—that Silas won't keep in the post-office store, because they don't agree with his stomach. Well, I was all packages that night, and it was through dropping one in the seat in front of me that I first saw the little boy.
He was laying down, getting to sleep if he could and pulling his eyes open occasional to see what was going on around him. His mother had had the seat turned, and she sat there beyond him, facing me, and I noticed her—flat red cheeks, an ostrich feather broke in the middle, blue and red stone rings on three fingers, and giving a good deal of attention to studying the folks around her. She was the kind of woman you see and don't look back to, 'count of other things interesting you more.
But the little boy, he was different. He wasn't more than a year old, and he didn't look that—and his cheeks were flushed and his eyelashes and mouth made you think "My!" I remember feeling I didn't see how the woman could keep from waking him up, just to prove he was hers and she could if she wanted to.