"Sarah, Maud, Albert Eddie, you, me, and one ticket to spare; such was my idea," said Uncle Charlie, he and Aunt Cordelia preparing to start. "The only thing we've ever given the Dawkins up to date is the whooping-cough. Picnic or circus, duty or pleasure, we'll have to put it to them which they want it to be."
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." He proceeded through the open doorway to the stone steps.
"In that case," from Aunt Cordelia as she followed him, "since you seem to put me in the wrong, I leave it to her own conscience. She is seven years old, a big girl going to school and Sunday school, and ought to know right from wrong." And the two were gone.
Conscience! Familiar shibboleth to the seventh age of little girls! Stern front behind which Aunt Cordelia these days hides her kindly features.
Somewhere beyond the neighborhood where Emmy Lou lived with Aunt Cordelia and Uncle Charlie, was the roundhouse and the yards of a railroad. Or so Aunt Cordelia explained. The roundhouse bell, rung every hour by the watchman on his rounds, made far-off melancholy tolling through the night.
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. "If your conscience was all that it should be, you'd be asleep."
Yet did Aunt Cordelia, as a rule, leave those matters to Emmy Lou's conscience which she thought she did? Did Emmy Lou three out of four Sundays find herself remaining at church rather than on her road home because she herself wanted to stay? Or taking off her new dress on reaching home because she wanted to get into the older one?
Or, rather, did she find her baffled if unsuspecting self, coerced and bewildered, doing these and other things in the name of choice when the doing was not through choice at all?