Abigail said she’d help--she’s one of them _new_ women--oh, I ain’t afraid of the word--she’s one of them new women that catches fire at a big thing to be done in the world just as sure as another kind of woman flares up when her poor little pride is hurt. I’ve seen ’em both in action, and so have you. And we made out a list--in between doughnuts--of them sixty-one women and girls and children that was working in Friendship Village, and we divided up the list according to which of us was best friends with which of ’em--you know that’s a sort of thing you can’t leave out in the sort of commercial enterprise we was embarking on--and we agreed to start out separate, right after supper, and see what turned out to be what. I went first to see Mary Beach, little David Beach’s sister. They lived about half a mile from the village on a little triangle of land that had been sold off from both sides and left because it was boggy. They had a little drab house, with thick lips. David’s mother set outside the door with a big clothes-basketful of leggings beside her. She was a strong, straight creature with a mass of gray hair, and a way of putting her hands on her knees when she talked, and eyes that said: “I know and I think,” and not “I’m sure I can’t tell,” like so many eyes are built to represent. Mary that I’d come to see might have been a person in a portrait--she was that kind of girl. And little David was there, laying sprawled out on the floor taking a clock to pieces and putting the items in a pie-tin. “You won’t care,” says Mis’ Beach, “if I keep on with the leggings?” “Leggings?” says I. She nodded to the basket. “It’s bad pairs,” she said. “They leave me catch up the dropped stitches.” “How much do they give you?” says I, brutal. If it had been Silas Sykes I’d never have dreamt of asking him how much anybody give him for anything. But--well, sometimes we hound folks and hang folks and ask folks questions, merely because they’re poor. “Six cents a dozen,” she says. I remember they had a fly-paper on the window sill, and the caught flies and the uncaught ones whirred and buzzed. I can see the room: The floor that sagged, the walls that cracked, the hot, nameless smell of it. And in it a woman with the strength and the figure of a race that hasn’t got here yet, and three children--one of them beautiful, and David, taking a clock to pieces and putting it together again, without ever having been taught. You know all about it--and so did I. And while I set there talking with her, I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else but that hole of a home, and the three splendid beings chained there, like folks in a bad dream. Someway I never get used to it, and I know I never shall. It makes me feel as if I was looking on the inside of a table spoon and seeing things twisted, and saying: “Already such things can’t be. Already they sound old and false--like thumbscrews!”