Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/279

out of Hattie Denoon’s skating party. Several of the Shrewsbury matrons did not see her when they met her on the streets. Others set her a thousand miles away by bland, icy politeness. Some young men about town grew oddly familiar in look and manner. One of them, with whom she was totally unacquainted, spoke to her one evening in the Post Office. Emily turned and looked at him. Crushed, humiliated as she was, she was still Archibald Murray’s granddaughter. The wretched youth was three blocks away from the Post Office before he came to himself and knew where he was. To this day he has not forgotten how Emily Byrd Starr’s eyes looked when she Was angry.

But even the Murray look, while it might demolish a concrete offender, could not scotch scandalous stories. Everybody, she felt morbidly, believed them. It was reported to her that Miss Percy of the library said she had always distrusted Emily Starr’s smile—she had always felt sure it was deliberately provocative and alluring. Emily felt that she, like poor King Henry, would never smile again. People remembered that old Nancy Priest had been a wild thing seventy years ago—and hadn’t there been some scandal about Mrs. Dutton herself in her girlhood? What’s bred in the bone, you understand. Her mother had eloped, hadn’t she? And Ilse’s mother? Of course, she had been killed by falling into the old Lee well, but who knew what she would have done if she hadn’t? Then there was that old story of bathing on Blair Water sandshore au naturel. In short, you didn’t see ankles like Emily’s on proper girls. They simply didn’t have them.

Even harmless, unnecessary Andrew had ceased to call on Friday nights. There was a sting in this. Emily thought Andrew a bore and dreaded his Friday nights. She had always meant to send him packing as soon as he gave her an opportunity. But for Andrew to go packing of his own accord had a very different flavour, mark you. Emily clenched her hands when she thought of it.