"Mis' Sykes!" says I. "But their piano and their book-cases and their name are just the same as yesterday. You know yourself how you said folks's furniture expressed them. And it does--so be they ain't using left-overs the way I am. I tell you, I've talked with her, and I know. Or rather I kept still while she told me things about Venice and Granada where she'd been and I hadn't. You've got all you thought you had in that house, and education besides. Are you the Christian woman, Mis' Sykes, to turn your nose up at them?" "Don't throw my faith in my face," says she, irritable. "Well," I says, "I won't twit on facts. But anybody'd think the Golden Rule's fitted neat onto some folks to deal with, and is left flap at loose ends for them that don't match our skins. Is that sense, or ain't it?" "It ain't the skin," she says. "Don't keep harping on that. It's them. They're different by nature." Then she says the great, grand motto of the little thin slice of the human race that's been changed into superiority. "You can't change human nature!" says she, ticking it out like a clock. "Can't you?" says I. "_Can't_ you? I'm interested. If that was true, you and I would be swinging by our tails, this minute, sociable, from your clothes-line." By this time she didn't hear anything anybody said back--she'd got to that point in the argument. "If," she says, positive, "if the Lord had intended dark-skinned folks to be different from what they are, he'd have seen to it by now." I shifted with her obliging. "Then," says I, "take the Fernandez family, in the Oldmoxon House. They're different. They're more different than you and I are. What you going to do about it?" Mis' Sykes stamped her foot. "How do you know," she says, "that the Lord intended them to be educated? Tell me that!" I sat looking down at her three-ply Ingrain carpet for a minute or two. Then I got up, and asked her for her chocolate frosting receipt. "I'm going to use that on my cake for to-morrow night," I says. "And do you want me to help with the rest of the telephoning?" "What do you mean?" she says, frigid. "You don't think for a minute I'm going on with that, I hope?" "On with it?" I says. "Didn't you tell me you had the arrangements about all made?" She sunk back, loose in her chair. "I shall be the Laughing Stock,--the Laughing Stock," she says, looking wild and glazed. "Yes," says I, deliberate, determined and serene, "they'll say you were going to dance around and cater to this family because they've moved into the Oldmoxon House. They'll say you wanted to make sure, right away, to get in with them. They'll repeat what you've been saying about the elegant furniture, in good taste. And about the academic and scholastic work being done. And about these folks being a distinct addition to Friendship Village society--" "Don't, Calliope--oh, don't!" said Mis' Sykes, faint.