"By messenger the next day noon come a letter for me that made me laugh a little and that made me a little bit mad, too. This was it:-- "'Dear Calliope: "'Come up and help straighten things out, do. This place breathes desolation. Everything is everywhere except everything which everyone wants, which is lost. Come at once, Calliope, pray, and dine with me to-night and give me as much time as you can for a fortnight. I'm having some people here next week--twenty or so for over the Fourth--and a party. A company, you know! I need you. "'ALEX PROUDFIT.' "It was so exactly like Alex to send for me just plain because he wanted me. Never a word about if I was able or if I wasn't putting up berries or didn't have company or wasn't dead. I hadn't heard a sound from him in the two years or more that he'd been gone, and yet now it was just 'Come,' like a lord. And for that matter like he used to do when he was in knickerbockers and coming to my house for fresh cookies, whether I had any baked or not. But I remember actually baking a batch for him one day while he galloped his pony up and down the Plank Road waiting for them. And I done the same way now. I got my work out of the way and went right up there, like I'd always done for that family in the forty years I could think back to knowing them, when I was a girl. I guessed that Alex had lit down sudden, a day or so behind his telegram to the servants; and I found that was what he had done. "Proudfit House stands on a hill, and it looks like the hill had billowed up gentle from underneath and had let some of the house flow down the sides. It was built ambitious, of the good cream brick that gives to a lot of our Middle West towns their colour of natural flax in among the green; it had been big in the beginning, and to it had been added a good many afterthoughts and postscripts of conservatory and entrance porch and sun room and screened veranda, till the hill couldn't hold them all. The house was one of them that was built fifty years ago and that has since been pecked and patted to suit modern uses, pinched off here and pulled off there to fit notions refining themselves gradual. And all the time the house was let to keep some nice, ugly things that after a while, by mere age and use-to-ness, were finally accepted wholesale as dignified and desirable. The great brown mansard roof, niched and glassed in two places for statues--and having them, too, inside my memory and until Mr. Alex pulled them down; the scalloped tower on a wing; the round red glass window on a stairway--these we all sort of come to agree to as qualities of the place that couldn't be changed no more'n the railroad track. Tapestries and water-colours and Persian carpets went on inside the house, but outside was all the little twists of a taste that had started in naked and was getting dressed up by degrees.