"It's mine," Calliope said, "mine. My dress. And I haven't ever hed the sheer, moral courage to get it made up."
And that I could well understand. For though Calliope's delicacy of figure and feature would have been well enough become by the soft pink, Friendship would have lifted its hands to see her so and she would instantly have been "talked about."
"Seems to me," Calliope said, smoothing the silk, "that if I could have on a dress like this I'd feel another kind of being—sort o' free and liberty-like. Of course," she added hurriedly, "I know well enough a pink dress ain't what-you-might-say important. But land, land, how I'd like one on me in company! Ain't it funny," she added, "in the city nobody'd think anything of my wearing it. In the city they sort of seem to know colors ain't wicked, so's they look nice. I use' to think," Calliope added, laughing a little, "I'd hev it made up and go to town and wear it on the street. All alone. Even if it was a black street. I guess you'll think I'm terrible foolish."
But with that the idea which had come to me vaguely and as an impossibility, took shape; and I poured it out to Calliope as a thing possible, desirable, inevitable.
"Calliope!" I said. "Bring the silk to my house. Let Madame Josephine make it up. And next week come with me to the city—for the opera. We will have a box—and afterward supper—and you shall wear the pink gown—and a long, black silk coat of mine—"
"You're fooling—you're fooling!" Calliope cried, trembling.
But I made her know how in earnest I was; for, indeed, on the instant my mind was made up that the thing must be, that the lonely pink dress must see the light and with it Calliope's shy hopes, long cherished. And so, before I left her, it was arranged. She had agreed to come next morning to my house, if Madame Josephine were willing, bringing the rose-pink silk.
"Me!" she said at last. "Why, me! Why, it's enough to make all the me's I've been turn over in their graves. And I guess they hev turned and come trooping out, young again."
Then, as she stood up, letting the soft stuff unwind and fall in shining abandon, we heard a little noise—tapping, insistent. It was very near to us—quite in the little passage; and as Calliope turned with the silk still in her arms the door swung back and there stood Grandma Hawley. She was leaning on her thick stick, and her gray lace cap was all awry and a mist of the fine, driving rain was on her gray hair.