"I'd found my glove, but I recollect I stood still, staring out the door. I see it like I never see it before--_They was living_. Them two young things out there on my porch, and all the young folks of Friendship Village, they was just living--trying to find a future and a life of their own. They didn't know it. They thought what they wanted was a good time, like the pioneers thought they wanted adventure. But here they were, young pioneers of new villages, flocking together wherever they could, seeking each other out, just living. And us that knew, us that had had life, too, or else had missed it, we was just letting them live, haphazard. And us that had ought to of been mothers to the town young, no less than to our own young, had been leaving them live alone, on the streets and stairways and school entries of Friendship Village. "I know I fair run along the street to the schoolhouse. It seemed as if I couldn't get there quick enough to begin the new way. "The schoolhouse was lit up from cellar to garret and it looked sort of different and surprised at itself, and like it was sticking its head up. Maybe it sounds funny, but it sort of seemed to me the old brick building looked _conscious_, and like it had just opened its eyes and turned its face to something. Inside, the music was tuning up, the desks that was only part screwed down had been moved back; in one of the recitation-rooms we'd got the gas plates for the candy making, and Abagail was in there stirring up lemonade in a big crock, and the other ladies, with white aprons on, was bustling round seeing to cutting the cakes. "It wasn't a good seven-thirty before they begun coming in, the girls nipping in pretty dresses, the boys awkward and grinning, school-girls, shop-girls, Mis' Sykes's Em'ly an' Abe Luck and everybody--they come from all directions that night, I guess, just to see what it was like. "And when they got set down, I realized for the first time that the law and some of the prophets of time to come hung on what kind of a time they had that first night. "While I was thinking that, the music struck into a tune, hurry-up time, and before anybody could think it, there they were on their feet, one couple after another. And when the lilty sound of the dance and the sliding of feet got to going, like magic and as if they had dropped out of the walls, in come them that had been waiting around outside to see what we was really going to do. They come in, and they joined in and in five minutes the floor was full of them. And after being boxed in the house all day, or bottled in shops or polishing windows or mending eaves-troughs or taking photographs of humbly houses or doing I donno what-all that they didn't like, here they were, come after their good time and having it--_and having it_. "Mis' Toplady was peeking through a crack in the recitation-room door.