"'I did. They have. I won't tell,' I says. 'Oh, Mis' Emmons, I guess the meeting to-night won't need to adopt Christopher.'
"She looked up at me quick, and then she started shining, too.
"'What a universe it is,' she says, '--what a universe it is.'
"Then we went off down to the meeting together. And the village was wonderful to go through, like a home some of us had hollowed out of the hills and was living in, common. As we went walking to the schoolhouse, the sidewalks seemed to me no more than ways dickered up to fasten us together, and to fasten us to them whose feet had wore the road before us, and to lead us to them that was coming, coming after: Christopher and Eph and Spudge Cadoza and Otie Daniel, or them like these. Otie Daniel had died the night before. Dr. Barrows had said Eph would not be lame, but we see he wan't sure of the value of the boy's physical life. But even so, even so we had a chance with Chris, and we had a chance with Spudge, and we had millions more. My feet wanted to run along them roads to meet the millions and my fingers tingled to get things ready. And as we went down Daphne Street to that meeting, I see how we all _was_ getting things ready, and I could of sung out for what I saw:--
"For Mame Holcomb, sprinkling clothes on the back porch and hurrying to get to the hall.
"For Mis' Uppers, picking her currants before she went, so's to get an early start on her jam in the morning.
"For Viny Liberty, setting sponge for her bread loud enough so we heard her clear out in the street, and for Libby, shutting up her chicken coop that they earned their own living with.
"For Mis' Toplady, driving by with Timothy, and her in the brown silk she'd made herself, like she's made all she's got.
"For Abagail Arnold, wiping out her window to be filled to-morrow with the pies of her hand.
"For little Mis' Sparks, rocking her baby on the front stoop and couldn't come to the meeting at all, 'count of having nobody to leave him with.
"For them that had left cloth bleaching in their side yards and was saving the price of buying bleached. For them that had done their day's work, from parlour to wood-shed, and had hurried up the supper dishes and changed their dress and was on their way to the schoolhouse. For them that had lived lives like this and had died at it. For all the little dog-eared, wore-out account books where every one of them women figured out careful what they couldn't spend. And I looked down the street till I couldn't see no farther, and yet Daphne Street was going on, round and round the world, and acrost and acrost it, full of women doing the same identical way. And I could see away off to the places that Daphne Street led past, where women has all these things done for them and where the factories is setting them free, like us here in the village ain't free just yet, and I felt a wicked envy for them that can set their hands to the New Work, that us here in Friendship Village is trying so hard to get in between whiles. And I could see away ahead to times when sponge and currants and clothes and coops and similar won't have to be mothered by women 'most as much as children are; but when women, Away Off Then, will be mothers and workers and general human beings such as yet we only know how to think about being, scrappy and wishful. But all the time, in their arms and in ours and nowheres else, lays all the rest of the world that is ever going to be. And something in me kind of climbed out of me and run along ahead and looked back at me over its shoulder and says: 'Keep up, keep up, Calliope.' And before I knew it, right out loud, I says: 'I will. I will.'