"Then one night I done what I'd always wanted to do. I took two dollars an' went to the theatre alone an' got me a seat. I put on the best I had, an' still I didn't feel like I was one of 'em, nor one of much of anybody. The folks on the car wasn't the way I meant, an' I felt mad at 'em for bein' differ'nt. There was a smilin' young fellow, all dressed black an' expensive, an' I thought: 'Put you side of Peter Cary an' there wouldn't be anybody there but Peter.' And when I got inside the theatre, it was just the same: one awful collection of dressed-up hair an' dressed-down backs an' everybody smilin' at somebody that wasn't me and all seemin' so sure of themselves. Specially the woman in front of me, but I guess it always is specially the woman in front of you. She was flammed out abundant. She had trimmin's in unexpected places, an' a good many colours took to do it, an' a cute little chatter to match. It come to me that she was more than different from me: she was the _otherest_ a person can be. An' I felt glad when the curtain went up. "Well, sir," Calliope said, "it was a silly little play--all about nothin' that you could lay much speech to. But oh, they was somethin' in it that made you get down on your hands and knees in your own heart and look around in it, and _look_. They was an old lady and a young mother and a child and a man and a girl--well, that don't sound like much special, does it? And that's just it: it wasn't much special, but yet it was all of everything. It made 'em laugh, it made 'em cry, it made _me_ laugh and cry till I was ashamed and glad and grateful. And when the lights come up at the end, I felt like I was kind of the mother to everything, an' I wanted to pick it up an' carry it off an' keep care of it. And it come over me all of a sudden how the old lady and the young mother an' man an' girl, man an' girl, _man an' girl_ was right there in the theatre, near me, over an' over again; an' there I'd been feelin' mad at 'em for seemin' far off. But they wasn't far off. They'd been laughin' and cryin', too, an' they knew, just like I knew, what was what in the world. My, my. If it'd been Friendship I'd have gone from house to house all the way home, shakin' hands. An' as it was, I just _had_ to speak to somebody. An' just then I see the flammed-out woman in front of me, that her collar had come open a little wee bit up top--not to notice even, but it give me an excuse. And I leaned right over to her and I says with all the sympathy in me:-- "'Ma'am, your neck is peepin'."