Chapter 24 Give Me More Please}Ep24

• Her mother, who had survived four daughters and three sons and lived to see all but three of her children married, was a serious and quite women. Caliope often wondered at how little she knew about her mother, who had always kept her own council and who had been too busy tending her family and being the proper wife of a respected council member to devote much time to idle conversation. Caliope had always held the hope that perhaps when she was older and married her mother might open a little to her, as she had seemed to do with her elder sisters. It made her a little melancholy to think that this was no longer possible. Her elder sisters were both married, and the eldest with two young sons of her own. Demetra, the eldest, had always been like a second mother to her and Helena, keeping them out of her mothers hair and teaching them the skills that their mother had taught her: how to keep a house, how to sew and weave, how to cook, clean, and the most difficult lesson, how to sit quietly and be seen and not heard. Caliope smiled wryly at the memory of those lessons. Her sister, like her mother, was not shy with a switch.
• She'd adored her sister though, and was heart broken when she was married to the son of a family friend who lived more than a weeks journey from her little city. 'Well', she thought a little sourly, 'I'm three days closer to her now. As if that does anyone any good.'
• Her second sister Xanthipe was nearly as charming and beautiful as Helena, but not half as wild. She'd never been that close to her second sister, though it was her who had taught the 'little ones' as she called them, the more charming arts of singing and dancing. She had a naturally clear and high voice and her entertainment at dinners caught the ears and eyes of a wealthy, and very powerful councilman who asked their father for her hand the moment she was of age. She lived in the same city as her family, and she visited her mother now and then, but she was often busy with running a magnificent household for a man who liked to entertain. In the end Caliope saw as little of her as she did her eldest sister. As for her brothers, she had no real memory of her eldest, Aristophanes who, when he was very young and she barely out of her swaddling wraps, had left home to become a man, and returned on his shield. All that she'd known of him growing up was the spear and shield kept in his honor in the entrance of their home. Her second brother Pericles, younger than Xanthipe, had survived his first battle and had come home to marry and inherited a nice bit of land from his wife's family, off of which he made a handsome living from his wheat fields and olive groves. Her youngest brother, Hector, was two years her senior and still doing his civic duty as a young soldier. She was sorry she never had a chance to say good bye to him.