"I’m so glad to see you, I could just eat you up," Amy declared, seating herself on Peggy’s knee, as each of the others had preempted a side. "And to think of your staying six weeks, when you said you’d only be gone a month." "I hated to leave Alice," Peggy’s face clouded for a moment, as she spoke her sister’s name. "She isn’t a bit well. You know we are going to keep Dorothy with us for a while. She’s so full of life that she’s a tax on her mother." "I stood on a tacks once," observed Dorothy, suddenly becoming interested. "It sticked into me, and I hollered." She frowned meditatively as she added, "I don’t like you to call me a tacks, either." "It’s another kind, darling. O girls, you don’t know how good it seems to get back to the Terrace, where people know each other and are real neighbors. I don’t see how Alice stands it." "Is it so bad living in a very big city?" Priscilla asked, rather doubtfully. "I believe I’d love it. I like crowds and noise and something happening every moment." Peggy shook her head with decision. "Just wait till I tell you. Alice lives in a flat, and there’s only one woman in the building whom she’d know if she met her on the street. One morning while I was there we heard the greatest commotion in the flat just over ours. Somebody screamed, and then we could hear somebody else hurrying around right over our heads, and then there was the sound of dreadful crying. The windows were open, you know, and we heard everything as plainly as you hear me." "Well, what had happened?" Amy demanded, as Peggy paused dramatically. "That’s what we couldn’t imagine. I wanted to rush right up first thing, but Alice said people didn’t do that way in big cities, and that she didn’t know the woman at all, though she thought the name on the letter box was Flemming. Well, the crying kept up till I couldn’t stand it any longer. I just walked upstairs and knocked, and when the girl came to the door, I said I lived on the next floor and I was afraid that somebody was in trouble and could I do anything to help. "O girls!" Peggy’s voice grew pensive at the remembrance of that sorrowful scene. "I never imagined anything so dreadful. The poor woman--her name was Fletcher instead of Flemming--had just had word that her little boy had been hurt by an automobile, and taken to a hospital. And she was so upset that she didn’t know how to get ready to go to him, and the girl was so stupid that she didn’t know how to help her. And I rushed around and found her hat and coat and put on her shoes for her--she was wearing slippers--and did everything, just as if I’d known her all my life. And then she wouldn’t let me go, and I went along with her to the hospital. She told me afterward that she had only lived in the city a few years and hadn’t made many friends. A few years!" repeated Peggy with fine scorn.