Emmy Lou

“ But the time was long, and the day was warm, and the sobs grew slower, and the breath began to come in long-drawn, quivering sighs, and the next Emmy Lou knew she was sitting upright, trembling in every limb, and someone coming up the stairs—she could hear the slow, heavy footfalls, and a moment after she saw The Man—the Recess Man, the low, black-bearded, black-browed, scowling Man—with the broom across his shoulder, reach the hallway, and make toward the open doorway of the First-Reader room. ”

“ Mary Agatha drew back; Mary Agatha was Emmy Lou’s newest friend. “It’s Friday,” said Mary Agatha.
“Of course,” said Rosalie, “I forgot.” Rosalie put her biscuit back.
“It’s ham,” said Rebecca Steinau.
Emmy Lou was hurt. It seemed almost like preconcerted reflection on her biscuits and her ham.
Hattie took Emmy Lou aside. “It’s their religion,” said Hattie, in tones of large tolerance. “We can eat anything, you and I, ’Piscopalians and Presbyterians.”
“But Rosalie,” said Emmy Lou; Rosalie, like Emmy Lou, was Episcopalian. ”

“ Next door to Emmy Lou, at Izzy's, lives an old, old man. His brows are white and his beard falls on his breast. He smiles on Emmy Lou when she goes to his knee to speak to him, but he draws Izzy to him and kisses him. [39] Aunt Katie calls him beautiful. Uncle Charlie calls him a glorious old patriarch. But Izzy's Mamma calls him father.
And suddenly to Emmy Lou, there in Aunt Cordelia's lap, God is a Person! He paces his goodly walks, as Papa does the flagging from the gate to the house with Emmy Lou running to meet him. ”

“ And Emmy Lou arose, her aunties having gone about their Saturday morning affairs, and seeking her little sacque with its scalloped edge, which she pulled on, and her little round hat which she carried by its elastic, went forth into the warm comfort of the Indian Summer morning to find him.
He was at his gate! The rule again! Georgie was ever to be found even so at his gate. Emmy Lou was shy, but not when she knew what she had to do, and why. Opening her gate and going out, paling by paling she went along past her house and her yard, to the little boy at the gate of his house and his yard. ”

“ For a day or two after Emmy Lou, four years old, came to live with her uncle and her aunties, or in fact until she discovered Izzy who lived next door and Sister who lived in the alley, Aunt Cordelia's hands were full. But it was Emmy Lou's heart that was full.
Along with other things which had made up life, such as Papa, and her own little white bed, and her own little red chair, and her own window with its sill looking out upon her own yard, and Mary the cook in Mary's own kitchen, and Georgie the little neighbor boy next door—along with these things, she wanted Mamma. ”

“ The sins at seven, the chubby, endeavoring Emmy Lou's sins, her cloak on the coat-closet floor instead of the closet peg, mucilage on Aunt Katie's rug where a paper outspread before pasting began would have saved it—sins such as these have no prod to reminder more poignant than this melancholy tolling of the roundhouse bell in the night.
"It is an uneasy conscience," Aunt Cordelia invariably claimed when Emmy Lou, waking, came begging for permission to get in her bed. [104] "If your conscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep." ”

“ Hattie liked to lead. She could lead Sadie. Generally she could lead Emmy Lou, not always.
But all the while slowly a conviction was taking hold in Emmy Lou’s mind. It was a conviction concerning Miss Lizzie.
Near Emmy Lou in the Fourth Reader room sat a little girl named Lisa—Lisa Schmit. Once Emmy Lou had seen Lisa in a doorway—a store doorway hung with festoons of linked sausage. Lisa had told Emmy Lou it was her papa’s grocery store.
One day the air of the Fourth Reader room seemed unpleasantly freighted. As the stove grew hotter, the unpleasantness grew assertive. ”

“ That very afternoon Aunt Louise began to help Emmy Lou with her lessons, and Aunt Cordelia went around and asked Hattie’s mother to let Hattie come and get her lessons with Emmy Lou.
And at school Dear Teacher, walking up and down the aisles, would stop, and her fingers would close over and guide the labouring digits of Emmy Lou, striving to copy within certain ruled lines upon her slate the writing on the blackboard:
The pen is the tongue of the mind. ”

“ And at home, it was Emmy Lou’s joy to gather her doll children in line, and giving out past lessons, recite them in turn for her children. And so did Emmy Lou know by heart her Second Reader as far as she had gone; she often gave the lesson with her book upside down. And an old and battered doll, dearest to Emmy Lou’s heart, was always head, and Hattie, the newest doll, was next. Even the Emmy Lous must square with Fate somehow. ”

“ Aunt Cordelia, even at the risk of being late to church, stopped short. She didn't see the matter in any such fashion at all! "Emmy Lou will prefer to go to her own Sunday school picnic too, I hope," decidedly. "How you distract and bother the child, Charlie!"
"I bother Emmy Lou? She and I are as near good friends as people get to be. We respect each other's honesty and go our own ways. I am going to leave the tickets where I put them yesterday. I planned to take her and the Dawkins to the circus. You and she can fight it out." ”

“ John, forgetting his cue and his cunning, was saying to Albert Eddie and Logan.
Emmy Lou moved on her stone.
"—rolls in a big keg, that elephant does, and turns it up and sits down on it. We'll show you the elephant too," Wharton, faithful to his cue, was saying to her.
Emmy Lou stood up. She handed the tickets to whoever might be to take charge of them. She put her hand in Albert Eddie's. "I didn't want to come to the picnic and not go to the circus," she said. ”

“ Emmy Lou told Sarah as she and the Dawkins with the rest of St. Simeon's Sunday school were put aboard the excursion cars.
"Of course you do," said Sarah approvingly. "We all do. It's right here. And," with the heartiness of one distributing largesse in privileges, [111] the meanwhile settling her three charges in their places, "when we get off the car Albert Eddie shall carry it."
Emmy Lou had a seat between Albert Eddie and Maud. Beyond Albert Eddie were three little boys in knickerbockers, blouses, and straw hats, as gloomy in face as he. ”

“ They laughed. But Dear Teacher did not laugh. The recess-bell rang. And Dear Teacher, holding Emmy Lou’s hand, sent them all out. Everyone must go. Desks and slates to be scrubbed, mattered not. Everyone must go. Then Dear Teacher lifted Emmy Lou to her lap. And when she was sure they were every one gone, Emmy Lou cried. And after a while Dear Teacher explained about A and do, so that Emmy Lou understood. And then Dear Teacher said, “You may come in.” And the crack of the door widened, and in came Hattie. Emmy Lou was glad she was a nintimate friend. Hattie had not laughed. ”

“ It was when the little girl brought a note from home because her ears were boxed. Miss Lizzie tore the note in pieces and threw them on the floor.
One lived in dread of her changing. One watched in order to know the thing she wanted. Emmy Lou knew every characteristic 139feature of her face—the lean nose that bent toward the cheek, the thin lips that tightened and relaxed, the cold survey that travelled from desk to desk.
Miss Lizzie’s thin hands were never still any more than were her eyes. Most often her fingers tore bits of paper into fine shreds while she heard lessons.
Life is strenuous. ”

“ Yes, I love you, Emmy Lou, better than all the proud and beauteous heroines in the big grown-up books, because you are so sunshiny and trustful, so sweet and brave—because you have a heart of gold, Emmy Lou. ”

“ When Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Charlie on their road to church met Emmy Lou this morning, her eyes, like her late accumulation of tickets, were pink. She to whom tears came hard and seldom had been crying.
"And how about the prize?" asked Uncle Charlie.
Emmy Lou, tears stoutly held back, handed it to him. He looked it over, opened it, read [220] her name in inscription within, then lifted his gaze to her.
"Well, I'll be doggoned!"
"Charlie!" from Aunt Cordelia.
"I surely will. The same to the other two?"
Emmy Lou nodded. There are times when one cannot trust oneself to speak. ”

“ Here Emmy Lou had spent the year in strenuously guiding a squeaking pencil across a protesting slate, or singing in chorus, as Miss Clara’s long wooden pointer went up and down the rows of words on the spelling-chart: “A-t, at; b-a-t, bat; c-a-t, cat,” or “a-n, an; b-a-n, ban; c-a-n, can.” Emmy Lou herself had so little idea of what it was all about, that she was dependent on her neighbor to give her the key to the proper starting-point heading the various columns—“a-t, at,” or “a-n, an,” or “e-t, et,” or “o-n, on;” ”

“ But Emmy Lou shook her head, and clung to Aunt Cordelia's knees when they would lift her up.
Aunt Cordelia was worn out, herself. One does not say good-bye to a loved sister, and assume the care of a chubby, clinging baby such as this one, without tax. "Whatever is to be done about it?" she said to Aunt [13] Katie despairingly. Then to Emmy Lou, "Isn't there anything you know that will do?" ”

“ Mr. Schmit was German. Mr. Dawkins is English. At Emmy Lou's, the teakettle, a vague part in family affairs, boils on the stove, but at Maud's, the teakettle, a family affair of moment, boils on the "hob," which is to say, the grate. And more, the father and mother of Maud and Albert Eddie not only have crossed that vague something, home of the little mermaid, the ocean, but their mother has all but seen the Queen. ”

“ She spoke with pride. "My mamma let me make it myself on the grate."
On the grate? Why not in the kitchen on the stove? Still that was Charlotte's own affair. More showy than tidy in her dress, she seemed one of those detached and anxious little girls hunting for friends. The kindly impulse was to respond to overtures, Emmy Lou knowing a past where she had needed friends. And besides there was the candy. Hickory-nut candy does not have to look tidy to look good. She had a liberal lunch outspread on the napkin upon her desk, but she had no candy. ”

“ Christmas Eve, the theater brilliant with lights and garlands, evergreens wreathing the box wherein she sat in her new crimson dress with Alice, Rosalie, Amanthus, and Charlotte, and Mrs. Pulteney just behind—fair and lovely Mrs. Pulteney who, like the mother of Charlotte, did not live with her husband, though Emmy Lou is doing her best to forget it. ”

“ Drive even a saint too far and he will show his manhood."
"Hattie's is a little pin," remarked Emmy Lou, even irrelevantly, "and Sadie's is a workbox, and that other little girl's was a locket on a chain." [218]
The morning of the fifty-third Sunday came. "I don't know which she is the more, proud, or alarmed, at thought of walking up the aisle this morning for her prize," said Aunt Cordelia after Emmy Lou left the breakfast table. "There are only three children who have come through successfully in the whole Sunday school, Charlie. ”

“ Emmy Lou was glad she understood these things better now. For persons altogether amiable in the affairs of the week-days to grow touchy and heated over the affairs of Sundays is only a measure of their [175] Christian zeal. There was comfort and reassurance in the knowledge. Time was when it would have frightened her to have Uncle Charlie slam the door, and made her choke over her waffle, and sent her down from her chair and round to Aunt Cordelia for comfort and reassurance.
Aunt Louise, addressing herself to Aunt Cordelia in her place behind the coffeepot, still further defended Mr. Glidden. ”

“ At the next corner they saw Miss Jenny coming. But along the intersecting street, one walking southward, one northward, toward the corner where Hattie, Emmy Lou, and Miss Jenny were about to meet, came two others—Mr. Bryan and the Drug-Store Man!
Something made Emmy Lou and Hattie feel queer and guilty. Something made them turn and run. They ran fast. They ran faster. Emmy Lou’s heavy school-bag thumped against her little calves. Her apple flew out. Emmy Lou never stopped. ”

“ Aunt Cordelia looked shocked. Aunt Louise looked stern. Uncle Charlie looked at Emmy Lou.
“That sounds more natural,” said Uncle Charlie, but nobody listened.
“She’s been missing,” said Aunt Louise.
“She’s growing too fast,” said Aunt Cordelia, who had just been ripping two tucks out of Emmy Lou’s last winter’s dress; “she can’t be well.” ”

“ Sadie was weeping wildly.
130Emmy Lou with the courage of despair cried out in the grasp of the threatening man, but the man lifting her into the carriage, was speaking himself, and to the driver. “Keep an eye on them—separated from the family,” he was explaining, and a moment later Hattie and Sadie were lifted after Emmy Lou into the carriage, and as the door banged, their carriage moved with the rest up the street.
“Now,” said Hattie, and Hattie sprang to the farther door.
It would not open. Things never will in dreadful dreams. ”

“ Every exigency in life save one, for an Emmy Lou at six, seemingly is provided for by rules or admonition, the one which sometimes is overlooked being lack of understanding.
"'Take heed that thou no murder do,'" was the new clause of the Commandments In Verse, she had recited at Sunday school only yesterday.
"'The way of the transgressor is hard,'" said Dr. Angell from his pulpit to her down in the pew between Uncle Charlie and Aunt Cordelia an hour later. ”