"Well now," says Mis' Sykes, "there's nothing to hinder our banging right ahead with our plan for to-morrow night, is there?" "Nothing whatever," I says, "to hinder me." Mis' Sykes jerked herself around and looked at me irritable. "Why don't you volunteer?" says she. "I hate to dig the news out of anybody with the can-opener." I'd have given a good deal to feel that I didn't have to tell her, but just let her go ahead with the reception surprise. I knew, though, that I ought to tell her, not only because I knew her through and through, but because I couldn't count on the village. We're real democratic in the things we know about, but let a new situation stick up its head and we bound to the other side, automatic. "Mis' Sykes," I says, "everything that we'd thought of our new neighbor is true. _Also_, she's going to be a new experience for us in a way we hadn't thought of. She's dark-skinned." "A brunette," says Mis' Sykes. "I see that through her veil--what of it?" "Nothing--nothing at all," says I. "You noticed then, that she's colored?" I want to laugh yet, every time I think how Mis' Postmaster Sykes looked at me. "_Colored!_" she says. "You mean--you can't mean--" "No," I says, "nothing dangerous. It's going to give us a chance to see that what we've always said could be true sometime, away far off, is true of some of them now." Mis' Sykes sprang up and began walking the floor. "A family like that in Oldmoxon House--and my nearest neighbors," says she, wild. "It's outrageious--outrageious." I don't use my words very good, but I know better than to say "outrageious." I don't know but it was her pronouncing it that way, in such a cause, that made me so mad. "Mis' Sykes," I says, "Mis' Fernandez has got a better education than either you or I. She's a graduate of a Southern college, and her two children have been to colleges that you and I have never seen the inside of and never will. And her husband is a college professor, up here to study for a degree that I don't even know what the letters stands for. In what," says I, "consists your and my superiority to that woman?" "My gracious," says Mis' Sykes, "ain't you got no sense of fitness to you. Ain't she black?" "Her skin ain't the same color as ours, you're saying," I says. "Don't it seem to you that that reason had ought to make a cat laugh?" Mis' Sykes fair wheeled on me. "Calliope Marsh," says she, "the way you set your opinions against established notions is an insult to your kind." "Established notions," I says over after her. "'Established notions.' That's just it. And who is it, of us two, that's being insulting to their kind now, Mis' Sykes?" She was looking out the window, with her lips close-pressed and a thought between her narrowed eye-lids. "I'll rejoin 'em--or whatever it is you call it," she says. "I'll rejoin 'em from living in that house next to me."