'No, I don't,' she answered simply, looking straight up at me. 'That was how it all commenced. My father kept the livery stable. But of course it wouldn't matter--keepin' a livery, I mean--if your family was all right. Jeff Randolph kept the grocery. Being a Randolph, of course he could. But my name's Smithson--Sadie Virginia Smithson--and my grandfather was a carpenter. I'm a dressmaker myself. That's the reason they didn't elect me to the Laurel Literary Society.' She paused a moment. 'I reckon you wouldn't understand about the Laurel Literary Society?' she questioned a trifle wistfully. 'Perhaps not,' I admitted. 'Well, it's a literary society, of course. The members read papers, and all like that, but it's a heap more'n that. Belonging to it kind of marks a person out in Johnson's Falls and gives 'em the--the--well, I reckon you'd call it the _entray_ to all the best homes in town. If you don't belong--well, I reckon it came kinder harder on me, not belonging, than it did on some of the others. Why, I'd have said the girls that started it were my very best friends. We'd played together as children, and I called 'em all by their first names, and they _knew_ I was just as smart, an' liked readin' an' all that just as well as any of 'em did. So when I wasn't asked to join--well, it just seemed to knock me right out. I wasn't but nineteen then, an' when you're young things hurt more, I reckon. Anyhow the slight of it got just fixed in my mind, an' I made a kind of a vow that I'd belong to that society some day if I _died_ for it. And then, after a while it came to me, maybe if I could just save money enough to go abroad, they'd ask me to read a paper before the society when I got back, 'cause mighty few people have traveled much from our town.--Well,' she looked thoughtfully away at the blue water, many an' many a night I've put myself to sleep thinking how it would be when I read that paper. You know, when you're young and kind of unhappy and slighted, how you make up things to sort of comfort yourself?' I nodded. 'Well, I could just see the whole thing, me standing there reading an' all, and when I'd get through I could almost hear the applause. They'd some of 'em have on gloves, you know, so it would sound softer an' more genteel-like than just common bare-hand clapping. Well, it takes time for a country dressmaker to save. It took me twenty years. I did have most enough once, but then my sister was taken sick an' what I'd saved had to go for her. But I just gritted my teeth an' commenced again, and at last this spring I had enough, an' I joined a party and went. Ours wasn't a regular party. It was just a professor an' his wife who were goin' anyhow, an' would take a couple of ladies with them, so there were just the four of us. Well, we traveled for a month or more, an' you better b'lieve I stretched my eyes to see all there was to see. An' then, all at once, the world just tipped itself right over an' went crazy.