"He laughed right into her eyes. 'I don't believe you think so,' he says, triumphant. And all of a sudden there come a-sticking up its head in his face the regular man look--I can't rightly name it, but every woman in the world knows it when she sees it--a kind of an _I'm the one of us two but don't let's stop pretending it's you_ look. "When she see it, what do you suppose Letty done? First she looked down. Then she blushed. Then she shrugged up one shoulder and laughed, sort of little and low and soft. _And she kept still._ She was about as much like the dignified woman that had just been talking to me about women's duty as a bow of blue ribbon is like my work apron. And as plain as the blue on the sky, I see that _she liked the minute when she let Elbert beat her--liked it_, with a sort of a glow and a quiver. "He laughed again, and, 'You stay just the the way you are,' he says, and he contrived to make them common words sort of flow all over her like petting. "That evening, when we marched into the Sykes's house to the meeting, he spoke to her like that again. The men was invited to the meeting, too, but Mis' Sykes let it be known that they needn't to come till the coffee and sandwiches, thus escaping the speech. Mis' Sykes ain't in favour of suffrage, but she does love a new thing in town, and Mis' Martin Lacy was so well dressed and so soft-spoken that Mis' Sykes would of left her preach foot-binding in her parlour if she'd wanted to. Mis' Sykes is like that. Letty was about the youngest there, and she was about the prettiest I 'most ever saw; and when he'd got them all seated, young Elbert Sykes, that was the only man there, just naturally gravitated over and set down by her, like the Lord meant. I love to see them little things happen, and I never smile at them, same as some. Because it's like I got a peek in behind the curtain and see the eternal purpose working away, quiet and still. "Well, Mis' Lacy, she talked, and she put things real sane and plain, barring I didn't believe any of what she said. And pretty soon I stopped trying to listen and I begun thinking about Emerel Daniel. I'd been down to see her just before supper, and I hadn't had her out of my head much of the time since. Emerel's cottage wasn't half a block from Black Hollow, the great low place beyond the river road that the town used as a dump. It was full of things without names, and take it on a day with the wind just right, Emerel had to keep her window shut on that side of her house. Water was standing in the hollow all the whole time. Flies and mosquitoes come from it by the flock and the herd. And when I'd held my nose and scud past it that afternoon to get to Emerel's, I'd almost run into Dr. Heron, just coming out from seeing Otie, and I burst right out with my thoughts all over him, and asked him if Black Hollow wasn't what was the matter with Otie and if it wasn't all that was the matter with him.