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He wa'n't no relation of Calliope's if you're as strict as some, but accordin' to my idea he was closer than that closer than kin. He was the grandchild of the man Calliope had been goin' to marry forty-some years before, when she was twenty-odd. Calvert Oldmoxon he was born an' bred up in this very house.
For presently Calliope herself said something to me of her having been twenty. One would as lief have broken the reticence of a rainbow as that of Calliope, but rainbows are not always reticent. I have known them suggest infinite things. In June she spent a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are wings.
An' then when everything was ready Calliope's dress done an' layin' on their best-room bed, the minister stayin' home from conference to perform the ceremony, even the white cake made off goes Calvert Oldmoxon with Martha Boughton, a little high-fly that had just moved to town. A new girl can marry anything she wants in Friendship if she does it quick.
An' when Calliope gets to the hotel the woman was about breathin' her last. An' it was Mis' Oldmoxon Martha Boughton, if you please, an' dyin' on the trip she'd made to ask Calliope to forgive her for what she done. "An' Calliope forgive her, but I don't imagine Calliope was thinkin' much about her at the time.
Hangin' round the bed was a little boy the livin', breathin' image of Calvert Oldmoxon himself. Calliope was mad-daft over children anyway, though she was always kind o' shy o' showin' it, like a good many women are that ain't married. I've seen her pick one up an' gentle it close to her, but let anybody besides me come in the room an' see her an' she'd turn a regular guilt-red.
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.
And so we came to Oldmoxon House and went up the walk in silence save that, at the steps, "How long shall I tell them to boil your eggs?" I asked desperately, to still the quite ridiculous singing of the known world. But then the singing took one voice, a voice whose firmness made it almost hard, save that deep within it something was beating....
An' I know when he says that, Calliope just put her arms around him, an' her head down, an' set sort o' rockin' back an' forth. An' she says: "'Oh, but I think it begins when we don't know. "After a while she took him back to bed, little round face lookin' over her shoulder an' big, wide-apart, lonesome eyes an' little sort o' crooked frown, for all the world like the other Calvert Oldmoxon.
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.
"Right here in this house is mixed up in it," she said; "I been thinkin' about it all the way up. Not very many have lived here in the Oldmoxon house, and the folks that lived here the year I mean come so quiet nobody knew it until they was here an' that ain't easy to do in Friendship. First we knew they was in an' housekeepin'. Their accounts was in the name of a Mis' Morgan.
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