We three walked home together in the afternoon sunshine—the man who, through all this time in Friendship, had been dear, and Calliope and I. I thought that Daphne Street had never looked so beautiful. The tulip beds on the lawns had been re-filled for summer, a touch of bonfire smoke hung in the air, Eppleby Holcomb was mending his picket gate, and over many magic thresholds of the cool walks were lintels of the boughs. Down town Abigail Arnold was laying cream puffs in the home bakery window; at the Helmans' Mis' Doctor Helman, wound in a shawl and a fascinator, was training her matrimony vine; the Liberty sisters had let out their chickens and, posted in a great triangle, were keeping them well within Liberty lawn confines; Doctor June was working in his garden and he waved his hat at us like a boy. ("It's a year ago now they give him his benefit," Calliope remembered; "ice-cream an' strawberries an' cake. An' every soul that come in he treated, one after another. An' when they got hold of him an' told him what that was doin' to the benefit box, he wanted to know whose benefit it was, anyway. An' he kep' on treatin' folks up to the last spoonful o' cream. He said he never had such a good time since he was born. I donno but he showed us how to give a benefit, too.")
We were crossing the lawn to Oldmoxon House when I said to Calliope what it had been decided that day that I should say:—
"Calliope," I asked, "could you be ready in a month or two to leave Friendship for good, and come to us in town, and live with us for always?"
She looked up at one and the other of us, with her little embarrassed laugh.
"You're makin' fun o' me," she said.
But when we had explained that we were wholly serious, she stopped and leaned against one of the great trees before the house; and it was at Oldmoxon House rather than at us that she looked as she answered:—
"I couldn't," she said quickly, and with a manner of breathlessness, "I couldn't. You know how I've wanted to leave Friendship, too, you know that. An' I want to yet, as far as wantin' goes. But wantin' to mustn't be enough to make you do things."
She stood, her head held up as if she were singing, as Liddy Ember had said of her, her arms tightly folded, her cheeks flushing with her fear that we would not understand.
"Oh," she said, "you know—you know how I've always wanted nice things. Wanted 'em so it hurt. Not just from likin' 'em, either, but because some way I thought I could be more, do more, live up to my biggest best if I could only get where things was kind of educated an'—gentle. But every time I tried to go, somethin' come up—like it will, to shove you hard down into the place you was. Then I thought—you know 'bout that, I guess—I thought I was goin' to live here in Oldmoxon House, an' hev a life like other women hev. An' when that wasn't to be, I thought mebbe it was because God see I wasn't fit for it, an' I set to work on myself to make me as good as I knew—an' I worked an' worked, like life was nothin' but me, an' I was nothin' but a cake, to get a good bake on an' die without bein' too much dough to me. An' then all to once I see that couldn't be the only thing He meant. It didn't seem like He could 'a' made me sole in order to save me from hell. An' I begun to see He must 'a' made me to help in some great, big hid plan or other of His. An' quick as I knew that an' begun wantin' to help, He begun showin' me when to. That's how I mean what I said about the Bell. Times like Elspie, or 'Leven, or like that, I can hear it just as plain as plain—the Bell, callin' me to help Him."