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it to the full in the next three weeks, without raising a finger or wagging a tongue to secure it. All Shrewsbury burned with gossip about the night of the storm—insinuations, distortions, wholesale fabrications. Emily was so snubbed at Janet Thompson’s afternoon tea that she went home white with humiliation. Ilse was furious.
“I wouldn’t mind if I had been rip-roaring drunk and had the fun of it,” she vowed with a stamp of her foot. “But I wasn’t drunk enough to be happy—only just drunk enough to be silly. There are moments, Emily, when I feel that I could have a gorgeous time if I were a cat and these old Shrewsbury dames were mice. But let's keep our smiles pinned on. I really don’t care a snap for them. This will soon die out. We'll fight.”
“You can’t fight insinuations,” said Emily, bitterly. Ilse did not care—but Emily cared horribly. The Murray pride smarted unbearably. And it smarted worse and worse as time went on. A sneer at the night of the storm was published in a rag of a paper that was printed in a town on the mainland and made up of “spicy” notes sent to it from all over the Maritimes. Nobody ever confessed to reading it, but almost everybody knew everything that was in it—except Aunt Ruth, who wouldn’t have handled the sheet with the tongs. No names were mentioned, but every one knew who was referred to, and the venomous innuendo of the thing was unmistakable. Emily thought she would die of shame. And the worst sting was that it was so vulgar and ugly—and had made that beautiful night of laughter and revelation and rapturous creation in the old John house vulgar and ugly. She had thought it would always be one of her most beautiful memories. And now this!
Teddy and Perry saw red and wanted to kill somebody, but whom could they kill? As Emily told them, anything they said or did would only make the matter worse. It was bad enough after the publication of that paragraph. Emily was not invited to Florence Black’s dance the next week—the great social event of the winter. She was left