is the matter with you, Emily?” said Miss Brownell suddenly and accusingly.
Emily was silent. She could not tell Miss Brownell what was the matter with her — especially when Miss Brownell used such a tone.
“When I ask one of my pupils a question, Emily, I am accustomed to having an answer. Why are you crying?”
There was another giggle from across the aisle. Emily lifted miserable eyes and in her extremity fell back on a phrase of her father’s.
“It is a matter that concerns only myself,” she said.
A red spot suddenly appeared in Miss Brownell’s sallow cheek. Her eyes gleamed with cold fire.
“You will remain in during recess as a punishment for your impertinence,” she said — but she left Emily alone the rest of the day.
Emily did not in the least mind staying in at recess, for, acutely sensitive to her environment as she was, she realized that, for some reason she could not fathom, the atmosphere of the school was antagonistic. The glances cast at her were not only curious but ill-natured. She did not want to go out to the playground with those girls. She did not want to go to school in Blair Water. But she would not cry any more. She sat erect and kept her eyes on her book. Suddenly a soft, malignant hiss came across the aisle.
“Miss Pridey — Miss Pridey!”
Emily looked across at the girl. Large, steady, purplish-grey eyes gazed into beady, twinkling, black ones — gazed unquailingly — with something in them that cowed and compelled. The black eyes wavered and fell, their owner covering her retreat with another giggle and toss of her short braid of hair.
“I can master her,” thought Emily, with a thrill of triumph.
But there is strength in numbers and at noon hour Emily found herself standing alone on the playground facing a crowd of unfriendly faces. Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence. Emily was a stranger and one of the proud Murrays — two counts against her. And there was about her, small and ginghamed and sunbonneted as she was, a certain reserve and dignity and fineness that they resented. And they resented the level way she looked at them, with that disdainful face under cloudy black hair, instead of being shy and drooping as became an interloper on probation.
“You are a proud one,” said Blackeyes. “Oh, my, you may have buttoned boots, but you are living on charity.”
Emily had not wanted to put on the buttoned boots. She wanted to go barefoot as she had always done in summer. But Aunt Elizabeth had told her that no child from New Moon had ever gone barefoot to school.
“Oh, just look at the baby apron,” laughed another girl, with a head of chestnut curls.
Now Emily flushed. This was indeed the vulnerable point in her armour. Delighted at her success in drawing blood the curled one tried again.
“Is that your grandmother’s sunbonnet?”
There was a chorus of giggles.
“Oh, she wears a sunbonnet to save her complexion,” said a bigger girl. “That’s the Murray pride. The Murrays are rotten with pride, my mother says.”
“You’re awful ugly,” said a fat, squat little miss, nearly as broad as she was long. “Your ears look like a cat’s.”
“You needn’t be so proud,” said Blackeyes. “Your kitchen ceiling isn’t plastered even.”
“And your Cousin Jimmy is an idiot,” said Chestnut-curls.
“He isn’t!” cried Emily. “He has more sense than any of you. You can say what you like about me but you are not going to insult my family. If you say one more word about them I’ll look you over with the evil eye.”
Nobody understood what this threat meant, but that made it all the more effective. It produced a brief silence. Then the baiting began again in a different form.
“Can you sing?” asked a thin, freckled girl, who yet contrived to be very pretty in spite of thinness and freckles.
“No,” said Emily.
“Can you dance?”
“No.”
“Can you sew?”
“No.”
“Can you cook?”
“No.”
“Can you knit lace?”
“No.”
“Can you crochet?”
“No.”
“Then what can you do?” said the Freckled-one in a contemptuous tone.
“I can write poetry,” said Emily, without in the least meaning to say it. But at that instant she knew she could write poetry. And with this queer unreasonable conviction came — the flash! Right there, surrounded by hostility and suspicion, fighting alone for her standing, without backing or advantage, came the wonderful moment when soul seemed to cast aside the bonds of flesh and spring upward to the stars. The rapture and delight on Emily’s face amazed and enraged her foes. They thought it a manifestation of Murray pride in an uncommon accomplishment.
“You lie,” said Blackeyes bluntly.
“A Starr does not lie,” retorted Emily. The flash was gone, but its uplift remained. She looked them all over with a cool detachment that quelled them temporarily.
“Why don’t you like me?” she asked directly.
There was no reply. Emily looked straight at Chestnut-curls and repeated her question. Chestnut-curls felt herself compelled to answer it.
“Because you ain’t a bit like us,” she muttered.
“I wouldn’t want to be,” said Emily scornfully.
“Oh, my, you are one of the Chosen People,” mocked Blackeyes.
“Of course I am,” retorted Emily.
She walked away to the schoolhouse, conqueror in that battle.
But the forces against her were not so easily cowed. There was much whispering and plotting after she had gone in, a conference with some of the boys, and a handing over of bedizened pencils and chews of gum for value received.
An agreeable sense of victory and the afterglow of the flash carried Emily through the afternoon in spite of the fact that Miss Brownell ridiculed her for her mistakes in spelling. Miss Brownell was very fond of ridiculing her pupils. All the girls in the class giggled except one who had not been there in the morning and was consequently at the tail. Emily had been wondering who she was. She was as unlike the rest of the girls as Emily herself, but in a totally different style. She was tall, oddly dressed in an overlong dress of faded, striped print, and barefooted. Her thick hair,
