CHAPTER XXI
“Romantic but not Comfortable”
A CERTAIN thing happened at New Moon because Teddy Kent paid Ilse Burnley a compliment one day and Emily Starr didn’t altogether like it. Empires have been overturned for the same reason.
Teddy was skating on Blair Water and taking Ilse and Emily out in turns for “slides.” Neither Ilse nor Emily had skates. Nobody was sufficiently interested in Ilse to buy skates for her, and as for Emily, Aunt Elizabeth did not approve of girls skating. New Moon girls had never skated. Aunt Laura had a revolutionary idea that skating would be good exercise for Emily and would, moreover, prevent her from wearing out the soles of her boots sliding. But neither of these arguments was sufficient to convince Aunt Elizabeth, in spite of the thrifty streak that came to her from the Burnleys. The latter, however, caused her to issue an edict that Emily was not to “slide.” Emily took this very hardly. She moped about in a woe-begone fashion and she wrote to her father, “I hate Aunt Elizabeth. She is so unjust. She never plays fair.” But one day Dr. Burnley stuck his head in at the door of the New Moon kitchen and said gruffly, “What’s this I hear about you not letting Emily slide, Elizabeth?”
“She wears out the soles of her boots,” said Elizabeth.
“Boots be—” the doctor remembered that ladies were present just in time. “Let the creature slide all she wants to. She ought to be in the open air all the time. She ought”—the doctor stared at Elizabeth ferociously—“she ought to sleep out of doors.”
Elizabeth trembled lest the doctor should go on to insist on this unheard-of proceeding. She knew he had absurd ideas about the proper treatment of consumptives and those who might become such. She was glad to appease him by letting Emily stay out-of-doors in daytime and do what seemed good to her, if only he would say no more about staying out all night too.
“He is much more concerned about Emily than he is about his own child,” she said bitterly to Laura.
“Ilse is too healthy,” said Aunt Laura with a smile. “If she were a delicate child Allan might forgive her for—for being her mother’s daughter.”
“S—s—h,” said Aunt Elizabeth. But she “s—s—s—h’d” too late. Emily, coming into the kitchen, had heard Aunt Laura and puzzled over what she had said all day in school. Why had Ilse to be forgiven for being her mother’s daughter? Everybody was her mother’s daughter, wasn’t she? Wherein did the crime consist? Emily worried over it so much that she was inattentive to her lessons and Miss Brownell raked her fore and aft with sarcasm.