Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/123

 or Shipley or Burnley, or just pure cussedness I know not— me say them before I’ve time to reflect.

“‘No doubt you would find more congenial company in Stovepipe Town,’ said Aunt Ruth.”  

MILY regretfully left the “Booke Shoppe,” where the aroma of books and new magazines was as the savour of sweet incense in her nostrils, and hastened down cold and blustery Prince Street. Whenever possible she slipped into the Booke Shoppe and took hungry dips into magazines she could not afford to buy, avid to learn what kind of stuff they published—especially poetry. She could not see that many of the verses in them were any better than some of her own, yet editors sent hers back religiously. Emily had already used a considerable portion of the American stamps she had bought with Cousin Jimmy’s dollar in paying the homeward way of her fledglings, accompanied by only the cold comfort of rejection slips. Her had already been returned six times, but Emily had not wholly lost faith in it yet. That very morning she had dropped it again into the letter-box at the Shoppe.

“The seventh time brings luck,” she thought as she turned down the street leading to Ilse’s boarding-house. She had her examination in English at eleven o’clock and she wanted to glance over Ilse’s note-book before she went for it. The Preps were almost through their terminal examinations, taking them by fits and starts when the class-rooms were free from Seniors and Juniors—a thing that always made the Preps furious. Emily felt comfortably certain she would get her star pin. The examinations in her hardest subjects were over and she did not believe she had fallen below eighty in any of them.