“He has the Priest flavour,” she told Laura, “though it isn’t as strong in him as in most of them. And he’s certainly helping Emily—she has begun to spunk up since he came.”
Emily continued to “spunk up” and by September, when the measles epidemic was spent and Dean Priest had gone on one of his sudden swoops over to Europe for the autumn, she was ready for school again—a little taller, a little thinner, a little less childlike, with great grey shadowy eyes that had looked into death and read the riddle of a buried thing, and henceforth would hold in them some haunting, elusive remembrance of that world behind the veil. Dean Priest had seen it—Mr. Carpenter saw it when she smiled at him across her desk at school.
“She’s left the childhood of her soul behind, though she is still a child in body,” he muttered.
One afternoon amid the golden days and hazes of October he asked her gruffly to let him see some of her verses.
“I never meant to encourage you in it,” he said. “I don’t mean it now. Probably you can’t write a line of real poetry and never will. But let me see your stuff. If it’s hopelessly bad I’ll tell you so. I won’t have you wasting years striving for the unattainable—at least I won’t have it on my conscience if you do. If there’s any promise in it, I’ll tell you so just as honestly. And bring some of your stories, too—they’re trash yet, that’s certain, but I’ll see if they show just and sufficient cause for going on.”
Emily spent a very solemn hour that evening, weighing, choosing, rejecting. To the little bundle of verse she added one of her Jimmy-books which contained, as she thought, her best stories. She went to school next day, so secret and mysterious that Ilse took offense, started in to call her names—and then stopped. Ilse had promised her father that she would try to break herself of the habit of calling names. She was making fairly good headway and her conversation, if less vivid, was beginning to approximate to New Moon standards.
Emily made a sad mess of her lessons that day. She was nervous and frightened. She had a tremendous respect for Mr. Carpenter’s opinion. Father Cassidy had told her to keep on—Dean Priest had told her that some day she might really write—but perhaps they were only trying to be encouraging because they liked her and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Emily knew Mr. Carpenter would not do this. No matter if he did like her he would nip her aspirations mercilessly if he thought the root of the matter was not in her. If, on the contrary, he bade her God-speed, she would rest content with that against the world and never lose heart in the face of any future criticism. No wonder the day seemed fraught with tremendous issues to Emily.
When school was out Mr. Carpenter asked her to remain. She was so white and tense that the other pupils thought she must have been found out by Mr. Carpenter in some especially dreadful behaviour and knew she was going to “catch it.” Rhoda Stuart flung her a significantly malicious smile from the porch—which Emily never even saw. She was, indeed, at a momentous bar, with Mr. Carpenter as supreme judge, and her whole future career—so she believed—hanging on his verdict.
The pupils disappeared and a mellow sunshiny stillness settled over the old schoolroom. Mr. Carpenter took the little packet she had given him in the morning out of his desk, came down the aisle and sat in the seat before her, facing her. Very deliberately he settled his glasses astride his hooked nose, took out her manuscripts and began to read—or rather to glance over them, flinging scraps of comments, mingled with grunts, sniffs and hoots, at her as he glanced. Emily folded her cold hands on her desk and braced her feet against the legs of it to keep her knees from trembling. This was a very terrible experience. She wished she had never given her verses to Mr. Carpenter. They were no good—of course they were no good. Remember the editor of the Enterprise.
“Humph!” said Mr. Carpenter. “Sunset—Lord, how many poems have been written on ‘Sunset’—