"You ought to speak it for me," I said. "I'm going to be Greece in the show to-night."
But they brought the basket then, and he went off with it. He was a little thin-legged chap—such awful thin legs he had, and a pale neck, and cropped hair, and high eyebrows and big, chapped hands.
"Don't you drop it, now!" says Mis' Sykes, that always uses a club when a sliver would do it.
Achilles straightened up his thin little shoulders and threw out his thin little chest, and says he:
"My grandfather was in the gover'ment."
"Go on!" says Mis' Sykes. "In Greece?"
"Sure," he says—which wasn't Greek talk, though I bet Greek boys have got something like it.
Then Achilles was scared to think he'd spoke, and he run off, still stumbling. His father had been killed in a strike in the Friendship mills, and his mother was sick and tried to sew some; and she hadn't nothing left that wasn't married, only Achilles.
The work went on among us as before, only I always waste a lot of time watching the girls work. I love to see girls working together—they seem to touch at things with the tips of their fingers. They remind me of butterflies washing out their own wings. And yet what a lot they could get done, and how capable they got to be. Ina Clare and Irene Ayres and Ruth Holcomb and some more—they were packing up and making a regular lark of it. Seemed like they were so big and strong and young they could do 'most anything. Seemed like it was a shame to close down Red Cross and send them back to their separate church choirs and such, to operate in, exclusive.
That was what I was thinking when Mis' Silas Sykes broke in—her that's the leading woman of the Friendship Village caste of folks.