Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/173

 of essays on Cousin Jimmy’s garden, with a poem for a tail-piece to each essay. It will be good practice and will please Cousin Jimmy.”  

do you want to do a thing like that?” said Aunt Ruth—sniffing, of course. A sniff may always be taken for granted with each of Aunt Ruth’s remarks, even when the present biographer omits mention of it.

“To poke some dollars into my slim purse,” said Emily.

Holidays were over—the Garden Book had been written and read in instalments to Cousin Jimmy, in the dusks of July and August, to his great delight; and now it was September, with its return to school and studies, the Land of Uprightness, and Aunt Ruth. Emily, with skirts a fraction longer and her hair clubbed up so high in the “Cadogan Braid” of those days, that it really was almost “up,” was back in Shrewsbury for her Junior year; and she had just told Aunt Ruth what she meant to do on her Shrewsbury Saturdays, for the autumn.

The editor of the Shrewsbury was planning a special illustrated Shrewsbury edition and Emily was going to canvass as much of the country as she could cover for subscriptions to it. She had wrung a rather reluctant consent from Aunt Elizabeth—a consent which could never have been extorted if Aunt Elizabeth had been paying all Emily’s expenses at school. But there was Wallace paying for her books and tuition fees, and occasionally hinting to Elizabeth that he was a very fine, generous fellow to do so. Elizabeth, in her secret heart, was not overfond of her brother Wallace and resented his splendid airs over the little help he was extending to Emily. So, when Emily pointed out that she could easily earn, during the fall, at least half enough to pay for her