Yet Rosalie and Amanthus were sharing Charlotte's desk and her candy. Was she their kind?
Hattie's voice had dropped and was even awe-struck as she explained. "Charlotte's papa and her mamma don't live together. I heard my mother and my aunt say so. She and her mother live in a boarding house next to the confectionery."
In a boarding house? Charlotte through necessity making her candy on a grate, therefore, and not in the kitchen! And proof indeed that she was not their kind, even to Emmy Lou, in a day when the home, however small, was the measure of standing and the rule!
Yet Alice has arisen and is looking across at Charlotte. Emmy Lou loves Alice. Light disposition or not, she is drawn to her. Her hair is a pale gold while the curls of her cousins are sunny, and her smile is in her reflective eyes while theirs is in lip and dimple. Of the three she loves Alice. Why? She has no idea why. Alice moves forward suddenly and going around to Charlotte leans to her and kisses her.
"Is Charlotte their kind?" Emmy Lou asks Hattie who also was watching.
"Ask them; they ought to know," tersely. "We can't afford to care, even if it does make us sorry. My father said people have to stand by their colors."
Later as school was dismissed and the class was filing out, Rosalie called to Emmy Lou, "If you will go by for Charlotte, she says she will come this afternoon, too."
Emmy Lou went home disturbed. Charlotte's father and mother did not live together, and because of this Charlotte was not their kind.
Marriage then is not a fixed and static fact? As day and night, winter and summer? Would she yet learn that the other family relations as brother and sister, parent and child, are subject to repudiation and readjustment, too?
Emmy Lou was just through serving as bridesmaid for Aunt Katie, in a filmy dress with a pink sash around what Uncle Charlie said was by common consent and courtesy her waist, whatever his meaning by this, and carrying a basket from which she earnestly scattered flowers up the aisle of St. Simeon's in the path of the bride, and incidentally in the path of Mr. Reade, the bridegroom, and had supposed she now knew something about marriage.