I, who was not yet acquainted with every one in Friendship, had already observed the two that day—brown, bent Grandma Hawley and the elaborately self-possessed Miss Eider, with a conspicuously high-pitched voice, who lived in the city and was occasionally a guest in the village. The girl, who I gathered had once lived in Friendship, was like a living proof that all village maids may become princesses; and the brooding tenderness of the old woman had impressed me as might a mourning dove mothering some sprightly tanager.
"Gramma Hawley brought her up from a little thing," Calliope explained to me now, "and a rich Mis' Eider, from the city, she adopted her, and Gramma let her go. I guess it near killed Gramma to do it—but she'd always been one to like nice things herself, and she couldn't get them, so she see what it'd mean to Lyddy. Lyddy's got pretty proud, she's hed so much to do with, but she comes back to see Gramma sometimes, I'll say that for her. Didn't anybody else hev on anything new?"
"No," Hannah knew positively, "they all come out in the same old togs. When the finger-bowl started I run up in the hall an' peeked down the register, so's to see 'em pass out o' the room. Comp'ny clo'es don't change much here in Friendship. Mis' Postmaster Sykes says yest'day, when we was ironin': 'Folks,' she says, 'don't dress as much here in Friendship as I wish't we did. Land knows,' Mis' Sykes says, 'I don't dress, neither. But I like to see it done.'"
Calliope, who is sixty and has a rosy, wrinkled face, looked sidewise down the long vista of the cooking-stove coals.
"Like to see it done!" she repeated. "Why, I get so raving hungry to see some colored dress-goods on somebody seem's though I'd fly. Black and brown and gray—gray and brown and black hung on to every woman in Friendship. Every one of us has our clo'es picked out so everlastin' durable."
Hannah sympathetically giggled with, "Don't they, though?"
"My grief!" Calliope exclaimed. "It reminds me, I got my mother's calicoes down to pass 'round and I never thought to take them in."
She went to her new golden oak kitchen cabinet—a birthday gift to Calliope from the Friendship church for her services at its organ—and brought us her mother's "calicoes"—a huge box of pieces left from every wool and lawn and "morning housework dress" worn by the Marshes, quick and passed, and by their friends. Calliope knew them all; and I listened idly while the procession went by us in sad-colored fabrics—"black and brown and gray—gray and brown and black."
I think that my attention may have wandered a little, for I was recalled by some slight stir made by Hannah Hager. She had risen and was bending toward Calliope, with such leaping wistfulness in her eyes that I followed her look. And I saw among the pieces, like a bright breast in sober plumage, a square of chambray in an exquisite color of rose.