Livvie obediently went on tiptoe and opened the door to the other room. Miss Baby Marie came behind her and rose on her toes and looked in.

“My, what a little tiny old, old man!” she whispered, clasping her hands and shaking her head over them. “What a beautiful quilt! What a tiny old, old man!”

“He can sleep like that all day,” whispered Livvie proudly.

They looked at him awhile so fast asleep, and then all at once they looked at each other. Somehow that was as if they had a secret, for he had never stirred. Livvie then politely, but all at once, closed the door.

“Well! I’d certainly like to leave you with a lipstick!” said Miss Baby Marie vivaciously. She smiled in the door.

“Lady, but I told you I don’t have no money, and never did have.”

“And never will?” In the air and all around, like a bright halo around the white lady’s nodding head, it was a true spring day.

“Would you take eggs, lady?” asked Livvie softly.

“No, I have plenty of eggs—plenty,” said Miss Baby Marie.

“I still don’t have no money,” said Livvie, and Miss Baby Marie took her suitcase and went on somewhere else.

Livvie stood watching her go, and all the time she felt her heart beating in her left side. She touched the place with her hand. It seemed as if her heart beat and her whole face flamed from the pulsing color of her lips. She went to sit by Solomon and when he opened his eyes he could not see a change in her. “He’s fixin’ to die,” she said inside. That was the secret. That was when she went out of the house for a little breath of air.

She went down the path and down the Natchez Trace a way, and she did not know how far she had gone, but it was not far, when she saw a sight. It was a man, looking like a vision—she standing on one side of the Old Natchez Trace and he standing on the other.

As soon as this man caught sight of her, he began to look himself over. Starting at the bottom with his pointed shoes, he began to look up, lifting his peg-top pants the higher to see fully his bright socks. His coat long and wide and leaf-green he opened like doors to see his high-up tawny pants and his pants he smoothed downward from the points of his collar, and he wore a luminous baby-pink satin shirt. At the end, he reached gently above his wide platter-shaped round hat, the color of a plum, and one finger touched at the feather, emerald green, blowing in the spring winds.

No matter how she looked, she could never look so fine as he did, and she was not sorry for that, she was pleased.