"'We don't like folks to swing on our front gate,' he says. 'He done it, but he marched right in and told us he'd done it. I give him a doughnut--an' he's kep' right on swingin' an' ownin' up an' eatin' doughnuts.' "'Even when he chased my chickens,' says Libby Liberty, 'he chased 'em like a little gentleman--_towards_ the coop an' not down the road. I always noticed that about him.' "'Yes,' says Letty, again, 'he's a dear little soul. _What makes us let him die?_' "She said it so calm that it caught even my breath--and my breath, in these things, ain't easy caught. But I got it right back again, and I says:-- "'Yes, sir. He was on the way to being somebody that Friendship Village could have had for the right kind of an inmate. And now he'll be nothing but a grave, that's no good to anybody. And Sodality,' I couldn't help adding, 'will likely pitch right in and take care of his grave, tasteful.' "And when I said that, it come over me how Emerel had dressed him and bathed him and made his clothes, and done washings, tireless, to get the fifty cents--besides bringing him into the world, tedious. And now it was all going for nothing, all for nothing--when we could of helped it. And I plumped out with what I'd said that morning to Silas:-- "'Why don't you fill up Black Hollow with sand-bar sand out of the river, now it's so low? Then, even if it's too late for Otie, mebbe we can keep ourselves from murderin' anybody else.' "Them half a dozen men of the common council set still a minute, looking down at Mis' Sykes's parlour ingrain. And I looked over at them, and my heart come up in my throat and both of them ached like the toothache. Because all of a sudden it seemed to me it wasn't just Timothy and Eppleby and Silas and some more of the council setting there by the wall--but it was like, in them few men, tired and not so very well dressed, was setting the lawmakers of the whole world; and there in front of them, wasn't only Mis' Holcomb and Libby and Letty and me, but Emerel Daniel, too, and all the women there is--saying to them: 'My land, we've dressed 'em an' bathed 'em an' sewed for 'em an' brought 'em into the world, tedious. Let 'em live--fix things so's they can live an' so's it needn't all go for nothin'.' And I sort of bubbled up and spilled over, as if everything we was all of us _for_ had come up in my throat. "'Oh, folks,' I says, 'just look what us in this room could have done for Otie--so be we'd begun in time.' "Right like a dash of cold water into my face, Mis' Sykes spoke up, cold as some kind of death:-- "'Well, ladies,' she says, 'I guess we've got our eyes open now. _I_ say that's what we'd ought to hev been doin' instead o' talkin' women votin',' she says, triumphant. "Then somebody spoke again, in a soft, new, not-used-to-it little voice, and in her chair over beside Elbert, Letty Ames leaned forward, and her eyes was like the sunny places in water.