l success,
they acted some het up. But Mis' Toplady, she bristles back at 'em. 'I'm
sure,' s'she, 'nobody wants you to die an' be buried in a nice, neat,
up-to-date, kep'-up cemet'ry if you don't _want_ to.' An' o' course she
hed 'em there.

"Well, it was that performance o' the Auxiliary's that rilly brought
Delia an' Abel together. It seemed to strike Abel awful funny, an'
Delia, lookin' at it with him, she see the funny too. They laughed a
good deal, an' they seemed to sort o' understand each other through
laughin', like you will. Delia bought the red waist, an' Abel walked
home with her--an' by that time Abel, with his half-scriptural,
half-boy, half-lover way that he couldn't help, was just on the craggy
edge o' fallin' in love with her. But I b'lieve it wa'n't love, just
ordinary. It was more like Abel, in his zeal for reddin' up the world,
see that he could do for Delia what nobody else could do--an' her for
him. An' that both of 'em workin' together could do more through knowin'
each other was near. That's the way,' Calliope said shyly, 'lovin'
always ought to be, my notion. An' when it ain't, things is likely to
get all wrong. Sometime--sometime,' she said, 'you'll hear about me--an'
how things with me went all wrong. An' I want you to remember, no matter
how much it don't seem my fault--that that's why they did go wrong--an'
no other. I was too crude selfish to sense what love is. I didn't
know--I didn't know. An' so with lots o' folks.

"I've often thought that Delia an' Abel meetin' at a Rummage Sale was
like all the rest of it. There was just a lot o' rubbish lumberin' up
the whole situation. Things wasn't happy for Delia to home--her mother,
Mis' Crapwell, had married again to a man that kep' throwin' out about
hevin' to be support to Delia; an' her stepsister, Jennie Crapwell, was
sickly an' self-seekin' an' engaged all to once. An' the young carpenter
that Jennie was goin' to marry, he was the black-eyed, hither-an'-yon
kind, an' crazier over Delia from the first than he ever was over
Jennie. Delia, she was shy about not havin' much education--Mis'
Proudfit hed wanted to send her off to school, an' Mis' Crapwell
wouldn't hear to it--an' Abel kep' talkin' that he was goin' to hev a
big church in the City some day, an' I guess that scairt Delia some, an'
Jennie kep' frettin' an' houndin' her, one way an' another, an'
a-callin' her 'parson's wife'--ain't it awful the _power_ them
pin-pricky things has if