I kept thinking that over next day when we were drawn up beside the curb in the car, waiting for them to come. “We’re trying to learn manner at last--the manner of being alive.” There were lots of other cars, with women so pretty you felt like crying up into the sky to ask there if we knew for sure what all that perfection was for, or if there was something else to it we didn’t know--yet. And thousands of women on foot, and thousands of women in windows.... I looked at them and wondered if they thought we were, and life was, as decent as we and it could be, and, if not, how they were preparing to help change it. I thought of the rest that were up town in colored nests, and them that were down town in factories, and them that were to home in the villages, and them that were out all along the miles and miles to the other ocean, just the same way. And here was going to come this little line of women walking along the street, a little line of women that thought they see new life for us all, and see it more abundant. “Manner,” I says, “we’re just beginning to learn manner.” Then, way down the avenue, they began to come. By ones and by fours and by eights, with colors and with music and with that that was greater than all of them--the tramp and tramp of feet; feet that weren’t dancing to balls, nor racking up and down in shops buying pretty things to make ’em power, nor just paddling around a kitchen the same as mine had always done--but feet that were marching, in a big, peaceful army, towards the place where the big, new tasks of to-morrow are going to be, that won’t interfere with the best tasks of yesterday no more than the earth’s orbit interferes with its whirling round and round. “That’s it,” I says, “that’s it! We’ve been whirling round and round, manufacturing the days and the nights, and we never knew we had an orbit too.” So they come, till they begun to pass where we were--some heads up, some eyes down, women, women, marching to a tune that was being beat out by thousands of hearts all over the world. I’d never seen women like this before. I saw them like I’d never seen them--I felt I was one of ’em like I’d never known that either. And I saw what they saw and I felt what they felt more than I ever knew I done. Then I heard Aunt Ellis making a little noise in her breath. “The bad taste of it--the bad taste of it, Calliope!” she said. “When I was a girl we used to use the word ladylike--we used to strive to deserve it. It’s a beautiful word. But these----” “We’ve been ladylike,” says I, sad, “for five or ten thousand years, and where has it got us to?” “Oh, but, Calliope, they like it--they like the publicity and the notoriety and the----”