rs the town et it for cake. Well, they
ain't any of 'em goin' to get a look at me. I don't give anybody the
chance to show me the cold shoulder. You can tell 'em I was here if you
want. They can scare the children with it."

"I won't tell," I said.

She looked at me.

"Well, I can't help it if you do," she returned. "I'm glad enough to
speak to somebody, gettin' back so. It's fourteen year. An' I was fair
body-sick to see the place again."

At this she asked about Friendship folk, and I answered as best I might,
though of what she inquired I knew little, and what I did know was
footless enough for human comfort. As to the Topladys, for example, I
had no knowledge of that one who had earned his money in bricks and had
later married a "foreigner"; but I knew Mis' Amanda, that she had hands
dimpled like a baby giant's, and that she carried a blue parasol all
winter to keep the sun from her eyes. I could not tell whether Liddy
Ember had been able to afford skilled treatment for her poor, queer,
pretty little sister, but I knew that Ellen Ember, with her crown of
bright hair, went about Friendship streets singing aloud, and leaping up
to catch at the low branches of the curb elms, and that she was as
picturesque as a beautiful grotesque on a page of sober text. I had not
learned where the Oldmoxons had moved, but I knew of them that they had
left me a huge fireplace in every room of my house. I could have
repeated little about Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, save that her
black week-day cloak was lined with wine broadcloth, and that she wore
it wrong side outward for "best." And of whether Abigail Arnold's
children had turned out well or ill, I was profoundly ignorant; but I
remembered that she had caused a loaf of bread to be carved on the
monument of her husband, the home baker. And so on. But these were not
matters of which I could talk to the hungry woman beside me.

Then, to my amazement, when I mentioned the Proudfits,--those great and
rich Proudfits whose motor had raced by our train,--Delia More would
have none of them.

"I do' want to hear about 'em," she said. "I know about 'em. I use' to
play with Miss Clementina an' Miss Linda when we were little things. I
use' to live with the Proudfits then, an' go to school. They were good
to me--time an' time again they've told me their home was mine, too. But
_now_--it wouldn't be the same. I know 'em. They always were cruel proud
an' cruel pious. Mis' Proudfit, she