“Lady-help,” thinks I, a-proceeding down the street. “Lady-help. That’s me. Kind of auxiliarating around. A member of the General Ladies’ Aid Society. Lady-help. Ain’t it a grand feeling?” I went straight to Abigail Arnold that keeps the Home Bakery. Abigail lives in the Bakery, and I donno a nicer, homier place in town. She didn’t make the mistake of putting up lace curtains in the store, to catch the dust.... I always wonder when the time’ll come that we’ll be content not to have any curtains to any windows in the living rooms of this earth, but just to let the boughs and the sun and the day smile in on us, like loving faces. Fade things? Fade ’em? I wonder they didn’t think of that when they made the sun, and temper it down to keep the carpets good.... Sometimes I dream of a house on a hill, with meadows of grass and the line of the sky and the all-day sun for neighbors, and not a thing to say to ’em: “Keep out. You’ll fade me.” But, “Come in. You’ll feed me.” Well, Abigail Arnold was making her home-made doughnuts that morning, and the whole place smelled like when you was twelve years old, and struck the back stoop, running, about the time the colander was set on the wing of the stove, heaped up with brown, sizzling, doughnut-smelling doughnuts. “Set right down,” she says, “and have one.” And so I done. And for a few minutes Silas and Red Barns and Friendship Village and the industrial and social relations of the entire country slipped away and was sunk in that nice-tasting, crumpy cake. Ain’t it wonderful--well, we’d ought not to bother to go off into that; but sometimes I could draw near to the whole human race just thinking how every one of us loves a fresh doughnut, et in somebody’s kitchen. It’s a sign and symbol of how alike we are--and I donno but it means something, something big. But with the last crumb I come back to commerce. “Abigail,” I says, “Silas wants to start a club for his and Timothy’s and Eppleby’s employees.” “Huh!” says Abigail, sticking her fork down in the kettle. “What’s the profit? Ain’t I getting nasty in my old age?” she adds solemn. “I meant, Go on. Tell me about it.” I done so, winding up about the meeting to be held the coming Friday in Post-Office Hall, at which Silas was to report on the progress of the club, after the business session. And she see it like I see it: That a club laid on to them sixty-one people had got to be managed awful wise--or what was to result would be considerable more like the stuff put into milk to preserve it than like the good, rich, thick cream that milk knows how to _give_, so be you treat it right.