with my neighbours. I am not responsible for Emily Starr’s training, thank goodness. If I were I wouldn’t let her have so much to do with Jarback Priest, either. He’s the queerest of all those queer Priests. I’m sure he must have a bad influence over her. Those green eyes of his positively give me the creeps. I can’t find out that he believes in anything.”
(Emily, sarcastically again: “Not even the Devil?”)
“There’s a queer story going around about him and Emily,” said Miss Potter. “I can’t make head or tail of it. They were seen on the big hill last Wednesday evening at sunset, behaving in a most extraordinary fashion. They would walk along with their eyes fixed on the sky—then suddenly stop—grasp each other by the arm and point upward. They did it time and again. Mrs. Price was watching them from the window and she can’t imagine what they were up it. It was too early for stars, and she couldn’t see a solitary thing in the sky. She laid awake all night wondering about it.”
“Well, it all comes to this—Emily Starr needs looking after,” said Mrs. Ann Cyrilla. “I sometimes feel that it would be wiser to stop Muriel and Gladys from going about so much with her.”
(Emily, devoutly: “I wish you would. They are so stupid and silly and they just stick around Ilse and me all the time.”)
“When all is said and done, I pity her,” said Miss Potter. “She’s so foolish and high-minded that she’ll get in wrong with every one, and no decent, sensible man will ever be bothered with her. Geoff North says he went home with her once and that was enough for him.”
(Emily, emphatically: “I believe you! Geoff showed almost human intelligence in that remark.”)
“But then she probably won’t live through her teens. She looks very consumptive. Really, Ann Cyrilla, I do feel sorry for the poor thing.”
This was the proverbial last straw for Emily. She, whole Starr and half Murray to be pitied by Beulah Potter! Mother Hubbard or no Mother Hubbard, it could not be borne! The closet door suddenly opened wide and Emily stood revealed, Mother Hubbard and all, against a background of boots and jumpers. Her cheeks were crimson, her eyes black. The mouths of Mrs. Ann Cyrilla and Miss Beulah Potter fell open and stayed open; their faces turned dull red; they were dumb.
Emily looked at them steadily for a minute of scornful, eloquent silence. Then, with the air of a queen, she swept across the kitchen and vanished through the sitting-room door, just as Aunt Elizabeth came up the sandstone steps with dignified apologies for keeping them waiting. Miss Potter and Mrs. Ann Cyrilla were so dumbfounded that they were hardly able to talk about the Ladies’ Aid, and got themselves confusedly away after a few jerky questions and answers. Aunt Elizabeth did not know what to make of them and thought they must have been unreasonably offended over having to wait. Then she dismissed the matter from her mind. A Murray did not care what Potters thought or did. The open closet door told no tales, and she did not know that up in the lookout chamber Emily was lying face downward across the bed crying passionately for shame and anger and humiliation. She felt degraded and hurt. It had all been the outcome of her own silly vanity in the beginning—she acknowledged that—but her punishment had been too severe.
She did not mind so much what Miss Potter had said, but Mrs. Ann Cyrilla’s tiny barbs of malice did sting. She had liked pretty, pleasant Mrs. Ann Cyrilla, who had always seemed kind and friendly and had paid her many compliments. She had thought Mrs. Ann Cyrilla had really liked her. And now to find out that she would talk about her like this!
“Couldn’t they have said one good thing of me?” she sobbed. “Oh, I feel soiled, somehow—between my own silliness and their malice—and all dirty and messed-up mentally. Will I ever feel clean again?”
She did not feel “clean” until she had written it all out in her diary. Then she took a less distorted view of it and summoned philosophy to her aid.
“Mr. Carpenter says we should make every experience teach us something,” she wrote. “He says every experience, no matter whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, has something for us if we are able to view it dispassionately. ‘That,’ he added bitterly, ‘is one of the pieces of good advice I have kept by me all my life and never been able to make any use of myself.’
“Very well, I shall try to view this dispassionately! I suppose the way to do it is to consider all that was said of me and decide just what was true and what false, and what merely distorted—which is worse than the false, I think.
“To begin with: hiding in the closet at all, just out of vanity, comes under my heading of bad deeds. And I suppose that appearing as I did, after I had stayed there so long, and covering them with confusion, was another. But if so, I can’t feel it ‘dispassionately’ yet, because I am sinfully glad I did it—yes, even if they did see me in the Mother Hubbard! I shall never forget their faces! Especially Mrs. Ann Cyrilla’s. Miss Potter won’t worry over it long—she will say it served me right—but Mrs. Ann Cyrilla will never, to her dying day, get over being found out like that.
“Now for a review of their criticisms of Emily Byrd Starr and the decision as to whether said Emily Byrd Starr deserved the said criticisms, wholly or in part. Be honest now, Emily, ‘look then into thy heart’ and try to see yourself, not as Miss Potter sees you or as you see yourself, but as you really are.
(“I think I’m going to find this interesting!)
“In the first place, Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said I was pig-headed.
“Am I pig-headed?
“I know I am determined, and Aunt Elizabeth says I am stubborn. But pig-headedness is worse than either of those. Determination is a good quality and even stubbornness has a saving grace in it if you have a little gumption as well. But a pig-headed person is one who is too stupid to see or understand the foolishness of a certain course and insists on taking it—insists, in short, on running full tilt into a stone wall.
“No, I am not pig-headed. I accept stone walls.
“But I take a good deal of convincing that they are stone walls and not cardboard imitations. Therefore, I am a little stubborn.
“Miss Potter said I was a flirt. This is wholly untrue, so I won’t discuss it. But she also said I ‘made eyes.’ Now do I? I don’t mean to—I know that; but it seems you can ‘make eyes’ without being conscious of it, so how am I going to prevent that? I can’t go about all the days of my life with my eyes dropped down. Dean said the other day:
“‘When you look at me like that, Star, there is nothing for me but to do as you ask.’
“And Aunt Elizabeth was quite annoyed last week because she said I was looking ‘improperly’ at Perry when I was coaxing him to go to the Sunday-school picnic. (Perry hates Sunday-school picnics.)
“Now, in both cases I thought I was only looking beseechingly.
“Mrs. Ann Cyrilla said I wasn’t pretty. Is that true?”
Emily laid down her pen, went over to the mirror and took a “dispassionate” stock of her looks. Black of hair—smoke-purple of eye—crimson of lip. So far, not bad. Her forehead was too high, but the new way of doing her hair obviated that defect. Her skin was very white and her cheeks, which had been so pale in childhood, were now as delicately hued as a pink pearl. Her mouth was too large, but her teeth were good. Her slightly pointed ears gave her a fawn-like charm. Her neck had lines that she could not help liking. Her slender, immature figure was graceful; she knew, for Aunt Nancy had told her, that she had the Shipley ankle and instep.
