Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/111

 landing quite a while to find out if I would begin talking to myself. She is always watching me—even when she says nothing—does nothing—I know she is watching me. I feel like a little fly under a microscope. Not a word or action escapes her criticism, and, though she can’t read my thoughts, she attributes thoughts to me that I never had any idea of thinking. I hate that worse than anything else.

“Can’t I say anything good of Aunt Ruth? Of course I can.

“She is honest and virtuous and truthful and industrious and of her pantry she needeth not to be ashamed. But she hasn’t any lovable virtues—and she will never give up trying to find out why I turned the pictures. She will never believe that I told her the simple truth.

“Of course, things ‘might be worse.’ As Teddy says, it might have been Queen Victoria instead of Queen Alexandra.

“I have some pictures of my own pinned up that save me—some lovely sketches of New Moon and the old orchard that Teddy made for me, and an engraving Dean gave me. It is a picture in soft, dim colours of palms around a desert well and a train of camels passing across the sands against a black sky gemmed with stars. It is full of lure and mystery and when I look at it I forget Queen Alexandra’s jewelry and Lord Byron’s lugubrious face, and my soul slips out—out—through a little gateway into a great, vast world of freedom and dream.

“Aunt Ruth asked me where I got that picture. When I told her she sniffed and said,

“‘I can’t understand how you have such a liking for Jarback Priest. He’s a man I’ve no use for.’

“I shouldn’t think she would have.

“But if the house is ugly and my room unfriendly, the Land of Uprightness is beautiful and saves my soul alive. The Land of Uprightness is the fir grove behind the house. I call it that because the firs are all so exceedingly tall and slender and straight. There is a pool in it, veiled