Aunt Ellis wrote to me:

“Dear Calliope: Now come and pay me the visit. You’ve never been here since the time I had sciatica and was cross. Come now, and I’ll try to hold my temper and my tongue.”

I wrote back to her:

“I’ll come. I was saving up to buy a new cook-stove next fall, but I’ll bring my cook-stove and come in time for the parade. I did want to see that.”

She answered:

“Mercy, Calliope, I might have known it! You always did love a circus in the village, and these women are certainly making a circus parade of themselves. However, we’ll even drive down to see them do it, if you’ll really come. Now you know how much I want you.”

“I might have known,” I said to myself, “that Aunt Ellis would be like that. The poor thing has had such an easy time that she can’t help it. She thinks what’s been, is.”

She wrote me that she was coming in from the country an hour after my train got there, but{217} that the automobile would be there for me. And I wrote her that I would come down the platform with my umbrella up, so’s her man would know me; and so I done, and he picked me out real ready.

When we got to her big house, that somehow looked so used to being a big house, there was a little boy sitting on the bottom step, half asleep, with a big box.

“What’s the matter, lamb?” I says.

“Beg pad’, ma’am, he’s likely waitin’ to beg,” says the chauf—— that word. “I’d go right by if I was you.”

But the little fellow’d woke up and looked up.

“I can’t find the place,” he says, and stuck out his big box. The man looked at the label. “They ain’t no such number in this street,” says he. “It’s a mistake.”

The little fellow kind of begun to cry, and the wind was blowing up real bitter. I made out that him and his family made toys for the uptown shops, and somebody in our neighborhood had ordered some direct, and he was afraid to go home without the money. I didn’t have any money to give him, but I says to the chauf——

“Ask him where he lives, will you? And see if we’d have time to take him home before Mis’ Winthrop’s train gets in.”{218}

The chauf—— done it, some like a prime minister, and he says, cold, he thought we’d have time, and I put the baby in the car. He was a real sweet little fellow, about seven. He told me his part in making the toys, and his mother’s, and his two little sisters’, and I give him the rest o’ my lunch, and he knew how to laugh when he got the chance, and we had a real happy time of it. And we come to his home.

Never, not if I live till after my dying day, will I forget the looks of that back upstairs place he called home, nor the smell of it—the smell of it. The waxy woman that was his mother, in a red waist, and with a big weight of hair, had forgot how to look surprised—that struck me as so awful—she’d forgot how to look surprised, just the same as a grand lady that’s learned not to; and there was the stumpy man that grunted for short instead of bothering with words; and the two little girls that might of been anybody’s—if they’d been clean—one of ’em with regular portrait hair. I stayed a minute, and give ’em the cost of about one griddle of my cook-stove, and then I went to the station to meet Aunt Ellis. And I poured it all out to her, as soon as she’d give me her cheek to kiss.{219}

“So you haven’t had any tea!” she said, getting in the automobile. “I’m sorry you’ve been so annoyed the first thing.”

“Annoyed!” I says over. “Annoyed! Well, yes,” I says, “poor people is real annoying. I wonder we have ’em.”

I was dying to ask her about the parade, but I didn’t like to; till after we’d had dinner in front of snow and silver and sparkles and so on, and had gone in her parlor-with-another-name, and set down in the midst of flowers and shades and lace, and rugs the color of different kinds of preserves, and wood-work like the skin of a cooked prune. Then I says:

“You know I’m just dying to hear about the parade.”

She lifted her hand and shut her eyes, brief.

“Calliope,” she says, “I don’t know what has come over women. They seem to want to attract attention to themselves. They seem to want to be conspicuous and talked about. They seem to want——”

“They want lots o’ things,” says I, dry, “but it ain’t any of them, Aunt Ellis. What time does the parade start?”

“You’re bound to see it?” she says. “When I think of my dear Miss Markham—they used to say her school taught not manners, but {220}manner—and what she would say to the womanhood of to-day.... We’ll drive down if you say so, Calliope—but I don’t know whether I can bear it long.”

“Manner,” I says over. “Manner. That’s just what we’re trying to learn now, manner of being alive. We haven’t known very much about that, it seems.”

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 ............