Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/280

A bitter report came to her ears that Principal Hardy had said she ought to resign from the presidency of the Senior Class. Emily threw up her head. Resign? Confess defeat and admit guilt? Not she!

“I could knock that man’s block off,” said Ilse. “Emily Starr, don’t let yourself worry over this. What does it matter what a lot of doddering old donkeys think? I hereby devote them to the infernal gods. They'll have their maws full of something else in a month and they'll forget this.”

“I’ll never forget it,” said Emily, passionately. “To my dying day I’ll remember the humiliation of these weeks. And now—Ilse, Mrs. Tolliver has written asking me to give up my stall at the St. John’s bazaar.”

“Emily Starr—she hasn’t!”

“She has. Oh, of course, she cloaks it under an excuse that she’d like a stall for her cousin from New York, who is visiting her—but I understand. And it’s ‘Dear Miss Starr’—look you—when it was ‘Dearest Emily’ a few weeks ago. Everybody in St. John’s will know why I’ve been asked to step out. And she almost went on her knees to Aunt Ruth to let me take the stall. Aunt Ruth didn’t want to let me.”

“What will your Aunt Ruth say about this?”

“Oh, that’s the worst of it, Ilse. She'll have to know now. She’s never heard a word of this since she’s been laid up with her sciatica. I’ve lived in dread of her finding out—for I know it will be hideous when she does. She’s getting about now, so of course she’d soon hear it, anyway. And I haven’t the spirit to stand up to her, Ilse. Oh, it all seems like a nightmare.”

“They’ve got such mean, narrow, malicious, beastly little minds in this town,” said Ilse—and was straightway comforted. But Emily could not ease her tortured spirit by a choice assortment of adjectives. Neither could she write out her misery and so rid herself of it. There were no more jottings in her Jimmy-book, no further entries in her journal, no new stories or poems. The flash never