use' to set up goodness an' worship
it like a little god."

This judgment startled me, and yet to its import I secretly assented.
For though I barely had their acquaintance, Madame Proudfit and her
daughter Clementina were thorns to me too, so that I had had no pleasure
in giving them back their greetings. Perhaps it was that they alone in
Friendship sounded for me a note of other days--but whatever it was,
they were thorns to me; and I remember how, once more, something within
me seemed to answer to this woman's bitterness.

None the less, since of the Proudfits I could give her some fragment of
account, I did so, to forge for Delia More what link I might between her
present and her past. And it was knowledge which all Friendship shared.

"You knew," I said, "that Miss Linda does not come here now, because she
married against the wish of her family."

Delia More looked up at me. But though I saw that now she softened
somewhat, I had no relish for giving to her anything of the sad romance
of beautiful Linda Proudfit (as they said) and the poor young clerk of
nobody knew where, who, a dozen years before, had fled away together
"into the storm."

"Then there is Calliope Marsh," I ventured, to turn my thought not less
than hers. But Delia More did not answer, and at this I was puzzled, for
I think that Calliope has lived in Friendship since the beginning, when
she and Liddy Ember were partners in their little "modiste" shop. "You
will recall Calliope?" I pressed the matter.

And at that, "Yes. Oh, yes," she said, and would say no more. And
because Calliope had forbidden me, I did not mention that I had seen her
on the train that morning, and that she was absent from Friendship, but
it grieved me that this stranger should be indifferent to anything about
her.

I would have passed my own gate, because the basket was heavy and
because I knew that the girl was crying. But she remembered how I had
shown her my house, and there she detained me and caught at her basket,
in haste to be gone. So I, who feel upon me a weak necessity to do a
bidding, watched her go down the still road; yet I could not let her go
away quite like that, and before I had meant to do so I called to her.

"Delia More!" I said--as familiarly as if she had been some other
expression of myself.

I saw her stop, but I did not go forward. I lifted my voice a little,
for by the distance between us I was less ill at ease than I am in the
usual persona