“Oh,” said Emily, “Hattie!” She was shocked, almost hurt, with Hattie. “Don’t you know about it?” she went on to explain. “She was going to be married and—he—he never came—he was dead.”
“No such thing,” said Hattie. “He runs a feed store next my father’s office. We’ve got cards. It’s the day after school’s out.”
“Then—which—” asked Emily falteringly.
“Why, I heard that the first of the year,” said Hattie. “It was Miss Carmichael that happened to.”
Emily went off to herself. She felt bitter and cross and disposed to blame Miss Beaton. She never wanted to see or to hear of Miss Beaton again.
Upstairs she took from her Latin Grammar a pencilled paper, interlined and much erased, and tore it into bits—viciously little bits. Then she went and put them in the waste-paper basket.
“You just feel it and then you write,” Margaret had said, and Emily was feeling again, and deeply; later she wrote.
It was gloomy, that which wrote itself on the paper, nor did it especially apply to the case in point, “but then,” she reminded herself, bitterly recalling the faithlessness of Hattie, of Rosalie, of Miss Beaton, “it’s True.”