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.
Not only because she was Mamma, all-wise, all-final, all-decreeing, but because, being Mamma and her edicts therefore supreme, she had bade her little daughter never to forget to say her prayers.
Not that Emmy Lou had forgotten to say them. Not she! It was that when she went to say them she had forgotten what she was to say. A terrifying and unlooked-for contingency.
Two days before, Papa had put his Emmy Lou into the arms of Aunt Cordelia at the railroad station of the city where she and Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise and Uncle Charlie lived. They had come to the train to get her. As he did so, Mamma, for whose sake the trip south was being made in search of health, though Emmy Lou did not know this, smiled and tried to look brave.
Emmy Lou's new little scarlet coat with its triple capes was martial, and also her new little scarlet Napoleon hat, three-cornered with a cockade, and Papa hastened to assume that the little person within this exterior was martial also.
"Emmy Lou is a plucky soul and will not willingly try you, Cordelia," he told his sister-in-law.
"Emmy Lou is a faithful soul and has promised not to try you," said Mamma.
"Kiss Mamma and kiss me," said Papa.
"And say your prayers every night at Aunt Cordelia's knee," said Mamma.