"We can take in two," says Mis' Swenson, "by four of the children sleeping on the floor that'll never wake up to know it."
"One can sleep on our lounge," says Mis' Amachi.
"We can put a couple or two in our barn," says a Flats man. "Oh, we'll find 'em room—no trouble to that."
Mis' Toplady and me looked at each other. Always before, in a Friendship Village catastrophe, her and me had been among the planners. But here we were, it seemed, left out, and the whole thing being seen to by the Flats.
"Say," says Mis' Toplady all of a sudden, "it's a woman!"
We were down in front by now, and I saw her too. The blue overalls, as I had called them, were a blue dress. And the woman, a little dark thing with earrings, stood there with her poor, torn lace curtain and her tin can with a geranium all wilted down.
"Mercy!" says Mis' Sykes, shuddering. "A woman down here!"
But I was looking at that woman. And I saw she wasn't listening to what some of the Flat women were saying to her. She had her head up and back as if she was listening to something else. And now she began moving through the crowd, and now she began running, straight to where all of us stood and Mis' Sykes was trying to hush the crying child.
The next second Mis' Sykes was near knocked down by the wildness and the strength of that little dark thing who threw herself on her and grabbed the baby.
Speaking Greek, speaking Hebrew, and Hittite, and Amalekite, and the tongues of Babylon at the confusion and the last day—for all we knew, these were what that woman was speaking. We couldn't make more head nor tail out of what she was saying than we had of the baby. But we could understand without understanding. It was in her throat, it was in her tears, it was in her heart. She cried, she sunk down to the ground, kissing that baby. He put out his hands and went right to her, laughing in the midst of the crying—oh, I've heard a baby laugh in its tears when it saw its mother, but this one was the best. And he snuggled up close, while she poured all over him them barbarous accents. But he knew what she said, and he said them back. Like before our eyes the alphabet of vermicelli had begun spelling words.