Emmy Lou was perplexed. Who is Hattie? In her pink-sprigged dress with her plaits tied behind her either ear? Breathing briskness and conviction? Why, Hattie is Hattie. But how convey this to Aunt Katie?
And where does she come from? How does Emmy Lou know? Or how is she expected to know? The population of school, in common with the parallel world of Sunday school, has no background other than school itself, but assembling out of the unknown and segregated into Primer Class, First Reader, Second Reader, even as Sunday school is segregated into Infant Class, Big Room, and Bible Class, performs its functions and disperses. Where, then, does Hattie come from?
"She came out of the cloakroom, and she asked me to sit with her."
Aunt Katie and Aunt Louise laughed. They have laughed at Emmy Lou before in this sense and so have others. She has said "Madam and Eve" happily and unsuspectingly all these years until Aunt Katie discovered it and not only laughed but told, and Aunt Louise, in whose person and carriage Emmy Lou takes pride, was a "blunette" until she found it out and laughed and told.
A little boy at school as long ago as last year laughed and told a boy named Billy who Emmy Lou had believed was her friend: "Ho, Teacher told her to wait there for the present, and she thinks it's a present," And at Sunday school a little girl laughed and told: "She thinks her nickel, that nickel in her hand, is going up to God."
In consequence of these betrayals of a heart too faithfully shown and a confidence too earnestly given, Emmy Lou is cautious now, laughter having become a lion in the path and ridicule a bear in the bush.
A picture hangs above Aunt Cordelia's mantelpiece. It has been there ever since Emmy Lou came to make her home with her aunties, but she was seven years old when she asked about it.
"Where is the man going?" she said then to Aunt Cordelia. "What will the lions do to him?"
"He is going right onward. The lions in his path will turn him aside if they can."
"Correct," said Uncle Charlie overhearing. "But the lions can't turn the trick. See the man's sword? And his buckler? The sword of his courage, and the buckler of the truth."