Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the looks of that back upstairs place he called home, nor the smell of it--the smell of it. The waxy woman that was his mother, in a red waist, and with a big weight of hair, had forgot how to look surprised--that struck me as so awful--she’d forgot how to look surprised, just the same as a grand lady that’s learned not to; and there was the stumpy man that grunted for short instead of bothering with words; and the two little girls that might of been anybody’s--if they’d been clean--one of ’em with regular portrait hair. I stayed a minute, and give ’em the cost of about one griddle of my cook-stove, and then I went to the station to meet Aunt Ellis. And I poured it all out to her, as soon as she’d give me her cheek to kiss. “So you haven’t had any tea!” she said, getting in the automobile. “I’m sorry you’ve been so annoyed the first thing.” “Annoyed!” I says over. “Annoyed! Well, yes,” I says, “poor people is real annoying. I wonder we have ’em.” I was dying to ask her about the parade, but I didn’t like to; till after we’d had dinner in front of snow and silver and sparkles and so on, and had gone in her parlor-with-another-name, and set down in the midst of flowers and shades and lace, and rugs the color of different kinds of preserves, and wood-work like the skin of a cooked prune. Then I says: “You know I’m just dying to hear about the parade.” She lifted her hand and shut her eyes, brief. “Calliope,” she says, “I don’t know what has come over women. They seem to want to attract attention to themselves. They seem to want to be conspicuous and talked about. They seem to want----” “They want lots o’ things,” says I, dry, “but it ain’t any of them, Aunt Ellis. What time does the parade start?” “You’re bound to see it?” she says. “When I think of my dear Miss Markham--they used to say her school taught not manners, but manner--and what she would say to the womanhood of to-day.... We’ll drive down if you say so, Calliope--but I don’t know whether I can bear it long.” “Manner,” I says over. “Manner. That’s just what we’re trying to learn now, manner of being alive. We haven’t known very much about that, it seems.”