"I expect," she said, "you'll think I'm real worldly-minded. I dunno. Mebbe I am. But when I get out in company and see everybody wearing the dark shades like they do here in Friendship so's their dresses won't show dirt, I declare I want to stand up and tell 'em: 'Colors! Colors! What'd the Lord put colors in the world for? Burn up your black and brown and gray and get into somethin' _happy_-colored, and see the difference it'll make in the way you feel inside.' I get so," Calliope said solemnly, "that when I put on my best black taffeta with the white turnovers, I declare I could slit it up the back seam. And I've felt that way a long time. And that's what made me--" She fingered the white box and lifted the cover from a mass of tissue-paper. "When Uncle Ezra Marsh died sixteen years ago last Summer," she said, "he left me a little bit of money--just a little dab, but enough to mend the wood-shed roof or buy a new cook-stove or do any of the useful things that's always staring you in the face. And I turned my back flat on every one of them. And I put the money in my pocket and went into the city. And there," said Calliope breathlessly, "I bought this." She unwrapped it from its tissues, and it was yards and yards of lustrous, exquisite soft silk, colored rose-pink, and responding in folds almost tenderly to the hand that touched it. "It's mine," Calliope said, "mine. My dress. And I haven't ever hed the sheer, moral courage to get it made up." And that I could well understand. For though Calliope's delicacy of figure and feature would have been well enough become by the soft pink, Friendship would have lifted its hands to see her so and she would instantly have been "talked about." "Seems to me," Calliope said, smoothing the silk, "that if I could have on a dress like this I'd feel another kind of being--sort o' free and liberty-like. Of course," she added hurriedly, "I know well enough a pink dress ain't what-you-might-say important. But land, land, how I'd like one on me in company! Ain't it funny," she added, "in the city nobody'd think anything of my wearing it. In the city they sort of seem to know colors ain't wicked, so's they look nice. I use' to think," Calliope added, laughing a little, "I'd hev it made up and go to town and wear it on the street. All alone. Even if it was a black street. I guess you'll think I'm terrible foolish." But with that the idea which had come to me vaguely and as an impossibility, took shape; and I poured it out to Calliope as a thing possible, desirable, inevitable. "Calliope!" I said. "Bring the silk to my house. Let Madame Josephine make it up. And next week come with me to the city--for the opera. We will have a box--and afterward supper--and you shall wear the pink gown--and a long, black silk coat of mine--" "You're fooling--you're _fooling_!" Calliope cried, trembling.