"'You express yourself so odd sometimes, Calliope,' says Mis' Sykes, distant—but Mis' Toplady and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, they both looked up and nodded, and they knew.
"I set holding Christopher in Mis' Emmons's living-room, and thinking about this and most everything else, when I looked out and see Insley going along. He hadn't been back in town since Christopher's father's funeral, two days before, and I'd been wanting to talk over with him a thing or two that was likely to come up at the meeting, that of course he was going to be at, and that had to be handled with thimbles on every finger, or somebody'd get pricked. So I rapped smart on the upper sash and called to him through the screen, but not before I had seen the look on his face. I've caught that special look only once or twice in my life—the look of somebody passing the house that is different to them from all other houses in the world. The look that wants to be a look and won't let itself be, that tries to turn the other way and can't start, that thinks it's unconscious and knows it isn't, and that finally, with Insley, give it up and looked Mis' Emmons's house straight in the face for a minute, as if he might anyhow let himself have that much intimacy.
"I had a little list of things I wanted to see go through that night. Enough of us was ready to have Sodality perform its last cemetery rite and bury itself so that that was pretty sure to go through, but I wanted more than that, and several of us ladies did; and it looked to me like the schoolhouse and the young folks and the milk and the meat of this town could be done nice things to, so be we managed the meeting right. I even had a wild dream that the whole new society might adopt Christopher. Well, I donno why that's funny. It ain't funny when a club makes a building or a play or a bazaar or a dinner. Why shouldn't it make a man?
"I told some of this to Insley, and he caught fire and lit up into a torch and had it all thought out beforehand, better than I could of dreamed it. But he made me feel bad. Haunted folks—folks haunted by something that was and that isn't—always makes me feel bad. How is it possible, I see he was asking himself the old, wore-out question, to drive out of the world something that is the world?
"While we talked, Christopher went off to sleep in my arms, and even while I was so interested, I was enjoying the change that comes—the head growing heavier and heavier on my arm, as if sleep weighed something.
"'Poor little kiddie,' I says, stupid.
"'Rich little kiddie,' Insley says, wistful.
"'Dear little kiddie,' says somebody else.
"In the dining room doorway Robin stood—in a doorway as we had first seen her.