Free Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery Page B

beautiful, and the other too disagreeable to be talked about. Of course, Mrs. Kent wasn’t like other women and there was no Ilse in feeling too badly about it. Nevertheless, she had wrecked and spoiled a frail, beautiful something – she had blotched with absurdity a moment that should have been eternally lovely. And she had, of course, made poor Teddy feel like an ass.
That
, in the last analysis, was what Emily really could not forgive.
    As she drifted off to sleep she recalled drowsily the events of that bewildering night – her imprisonment in the lonely church – the horror of touching the dog – the worse horror of Mad Mr. Morrison’s pursuit – her rapture of relief at Teddy’s voice – the brief little moonlit idyll in the graveyard – of all places for an idyll! – the tragicomic advent of poor morbid, jealous Mrs. Kent.
    “I hope I wasn’t too hard on her,” thought Emily as she drifted into slumber. “If I was I’m sorry. I’ll have to write it down as a bad deed in my diary. I feel somehow as if I’d grown up all at once tonight – yesterday seems years away. But what a chapter it will make for my diary. I’ll write it all down – all but Teddy’s saying I was the sweetest girl in the world.
That’s
too – dear – to write. I’ll – just –
remember
it.”
    * See
Emily of New Moon
.

“AS ITHERS SEE US”
    E mily had finished mopping up the kitchen floor at New Moon and was absorbed in sanding it in the beautiful and complicated “herring-bone pattern” which was one of the New Moon traditions, having been invented, so it was said, by great-great-grandmother of “Here I stay” fame. Aunt Laura had taught Emily how to do it and Emily was proud of her skill. Even Aunt Elizabeth had condescended to say that Emily sanded the famous pattern very well, and when Aunt Elizabeth praised, further comment was superfluous. New Moon was the only place in Blair Water where the old custom of sanding the floor was kept up; other housewives had long ago begun to Ilse “new-fangled” devices and patent cleaners for making their floors white. But Dame Elizabeth Murray would none of such; as long as she reigned at New Moon so long should candles burn and sanded floors gleam whitely.
    Aunt Elizabeth had exasperated Emily somewhat by insisting that the latter should put on Aunt Laura’s old “Mother Hubbard” while she was scrubbing the floor. A “Mother Hubbard,” it may be necessary to explain to those of this generation, was a loose and shapeless garment whichserved principally as a sort of morning gown and was liked in its day because it was cool and easily put on. Aunt Elizabeth, it is quite unnecessary to say, disapproved entirely of Mother Hubbards. She considered them the last word in slovenliness, and Laura was never permitted to have another one. But the old one, though its original pretty lilac tint had faded to a dingy white, was still too “good” to be banished to the rag bag; and it was this which Emily had been told to put on.
    Emily detested Mother Hubbards as heartily as Aunt Elizabeth herself did. They were worse, she considered, even than the hated “baby aprons” of her first summer at New Moon. She knew she looked ridiculous in Aunt Laura’s Mother Hubbard, which came to her feet, and hung in loose, unbeautiful lines from her thin young shoulders; and Emily had a horror of being “ridiculous.” She had once shocked Aunt Elizabeth by coolly telling her that she would “rather be bad than ridiculous.” Emily had scrubbed and sanded with one eye on the door, ready to run if any stranger loomed up while she had on that hideous wrapper.
    It was not, as Emily very well knew, a Murray tradition to “run.” At New Moon you stood your ground, no matter what you had on – the presupposition being that you were always neatly and properly habited for the occupation of the moment. Emily recognised the propriety of this, yet was, nevertheless, foolish and young enough to feel