om
was where the little noise come from--a little new cry.

"'Oh, Liddy,' Calliope says--her head up like she was singin'--'Oh,
Liddy--the New People have got their little child.'

"An' I see, though of course she didn't anywheres near realize it then,
that she was plantin' herself another cedar."

XIX

HERSELF

After all, it was as if I had first been told about refraction and then
had been shown a rainbow. 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. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream
of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I
was tying on my trees in the garden directly the original blossoms fell
off.

Calliope nodded in entire acceptance.

"But that wasn't so queer as my dream," she said. "My dream about
myself--I mean my rill, true regular self," she added, with a manner of
testing me.

I think that we all dream our real, true, regular selves, only we do not
dream us until we come true. I said something of this to Calliope; and
then she told me.

"It was when I was twenty," she said, "an' it was a little while
after--well, things wasn't so very happy for me. But first thing I must
tell you about the picture. We didn't have so very many pictures. But in
my room used to be an old steel engraving of a poet, a man walkin'
'round under some kind o' trees in blossom. He had a beautiful face an'
a look on it like he see heaven. I use' to look at the picture an' look
at it, an' when I did, it seemed almost like I was off somewheres else.

"Then one night I had my dream. I thought I was walkin' down a long
road, green an' shady an' quite wide, an' fields around an' no folks. I
know I was hurryin'--oh, I was in such a hurry to see somebody, seems
though, somebody I was goin' to see when I got to the end o' the road.
An' I was so happy--did you ever dream o' being happy, I mean if you
wasn't so very happy in rill life? It puts you in mind o' havin' a pain
in your side an' then gettin' in one big, deep breath when the pain
don't hurt. In rill life I was lonesome, an' I hated Friendship an' I
wanted to get away