And the worst of it was, David’s mother was so used to it. She was so bitter used to it. And oh--don’t things turn round in the world? A few years before if somebody like me had gone to see her, I’d of been telling her to be resigned, and to make the best of her lot, and trying to give her to understand that the Lord had meant it personal. And instead, when she said she was doing nice, I longed to say to her: “No, no, Mis’ Beach! Don’t you make that mistake. You ain’t doing nice. As long as you think you are, this world is being held back. It’s you that’s got to help folks to know that you _aren’t_ doing nice. And to make folks wonder why.” But I didn’t say it to her. I s’pose I haven’t got that far--yet. She said she’d like to come to the club that Silas proposed, and Mary, she said she’d come. They didn’t question much about it--they merely accepted it and said they’d come. And I went out into the April after-supper light, with a bird or two twittering sleepy, and an orange and lemon and water-melon sunset doing its best to attract my attention, and I says out loud to April in general: “A club. A club. So we’re going to help that house with a club.” Then I stopped to Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house. Mis’ Cripps’s boarding house faces the railroad tracks, and I never went by there without seeing her milk bottles all set out on her porch, indelicate, like some of the kitchen lining showing. Bettie Forkaw and Libbie Collins and Rose Miller and Lizzie Lane, pickle factory girls, lived there. They were all home, out on the smoky porch, among the milk bottles, laughing and talking and having a grand time. They had sleeves above their elbows and waists turned in at the throat with ruffles of cheap lace, and hair braided in bunches over their ears and dragged low on their foreheads, and they had long, shiney beads round their necks, and square, shiney buckles on their low shoes. Betty was pretty and laughed loud and had uncovered-looking eyes. Libbie was big and strong and still. Rose was thin, and she had less blood and more bones than anybody I ever see. And Lizzie--Lizzie might have been a freshman in any college you might name. She’d have done just as good work in figures as she did in pickles--only cucumbers come her way and class-rooms didn’t. “Hello, girls,” I says, “how are you to-night? Do you want to be a club?” “To do what?” says they. “Have a good time,” says I. “Have music--eat a little something--dance--read a little, maybe. And ask your friends there. A _club_, you know.” After we’d talked it over, all four of ’em said yes, they wished they had some place to go evenings and wouldn’t it be fine to have some place give to ’em where they could go. I didn’t discuss it over with ’em at all--but I done the same thing I’d done before, and that I cannot believe anybody has the right to ask, no matter how rich the questioner or how poor the questionee.