"What name?" she says, though—and I see she was friendlier than I'd thought.
"Why, mine's Calliope Marsh," I says, hearty. "What's yours?"
She looked so funny—I guess not many paid her much attention.
"Delia," she says. "You're expected," she says, and opened the inside door.
The room was long and soft and wine-colored, with a fire burning in the fireplace, and more lamps than was necessary, but that altogether didn't make much more light than one, only spread it out more. The piano was open, and there was a vase of roses—in Winter! They seemed to have them, I found out later, as casual as if there was a combined wedding and funeral in the house all the time. But they certainly made a beautiful picture.
But all this I sort of took in out of my eyes' four corners, while the rest of me looked at what was before the fire.
A big, low-backed chair was there, as fat and soft as a sofa. And in it was Ellen, in a white dress—in Winter! She wore them, I saw after a while, as casual as if she was at a party, perpetual. But there was something else there in a white dress, too, sitting on her lap, with his pink, bare feet stretched out to the blaze. And he was laughing, and Ellen was, too, at Russell, her husband, sitting on the floor, and aiming his head right at the baby's stomach, to hear him laugh out like—oh, like bluebells must be doing in the Spring.
"Pretty enough to paint," says I—which was the first they knew I was there.