"Well, and that night, while I heard Insley talking, was the first I knew that other towns had thought about these things, too, and was beginning to stir and to stir things. Insley talked about it light enough, laughing, taking it all casual on the outside, but underneath with a splendid earnestness that was like the warp to his words. He talked like we could pick Friendship Village up, same as a strand if we wanted, and make it fine and right for weaving in a big pattern that his eyes seemed to see. He talked like our village, and everybody's village and everybody's city wasn't just a lot of streets laid down and walls set up, and little families and little clubs and little separate groups of folks organized by themselves. But he spoke like the whole town was just one street and _no_ walls, and like every town was a piece of the Big Family that lives on the same street, all around the world and back again. And he seemed to feel that the chief thing all of us was up to was thinking about this family and doing for it and being it, and getting it to be the way it can be when we all know how. And he seemed to think the things us ladies had wanted to do was some of the things that would help it to be the way it can. "When he stopped, Robin looked up at him from the hearth-rug: '"The world is beginning,"' she quotes to him from somewheres; "'I must go and help the king."' "He nodded, looking down at her and seeing, as he must have seen, that her face was all kindled into the same kind of a glory that was in his. It was a nice minute for them, but I was so excited I piped right up in the middle of it:-- "'Oh,' I says, '_them_ things! Was it them kind of things you meant about in Sodality to-night that we'd ought to do? Why, us ladies has wanted to do things like that, but we felt sort of sneaking about it and like we was working against the council and putting our interests before the town treasury--' "'And of the cemetery,' he says. "'Is _that_,' I ask' him, 'what you're professor of, over to Indian Mound college?' "'Something like that,' he says. "'Nothing in a book, with long words and italics?' I ask' him. "'Well,' he says, 'it's getting in books now, a little. But it doesn't need any long words.' "'Why,' I says, 'it's just being professor of human beings, then?' "'Trying to be, perhaps,' he says, grave. "'Professor of Human Beings,' I said over to myself; 'professor of being human....' "On this nice minute, the front door, without no bell or knock, opened to let in Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, with a shawl over her head and a tin can in her hand.