Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/215

 Every week-end I come home to New Moon these things seem dearer to me—more a part of me. I love just as much as. I think Aunt Elizabeth is like this, too. That is why she will not have anything changed at New Moon. I am beginning to understand her better. I believe she likes me now, too. I was only a duty at first, but now I am something more.

“I stayed in the graveyard until a dull gold twilight came down and made a glimmering spectral place of it. Then Teddy came for me and we walked together up the field and through the Tomorrow Road. It is really a Today Road now, for the trees along it are above our heads, but we still call it the Tomorrow Road—partly out of habit and partly because we talk so much on it of tomorrows and what we hope to do in them. Somehow, Teddy is the only person I like to talk to about my tomorrows and my ambitions. There is no one else. Perry scoffs at my literary aspirations. He says, when I say anything about writing books, ‘What is the good of that sort of thing?’ And of course if a person can’t see ‘the good’ for himself you can’t explain it to him. I can’t even talk to Dean about them—not since he said so bitterly one evening, ‘I hate to hear of your tomorrows—they cannot be tomorrows.” I think in a way Dean doesn’t like to think of my growing up—I  he has a little of the Priest jealousy of sharing, especially friendship, with any one else—or with the world. I feel thrown back on myself. Somehow, it has seemed to me lately that Dean isn’t interested any longer in my writing ambitions. He even, it seems to me, ridicules them slightly. For instance, Mr. Carpenter was delighted with my, and told me it was excellent; but when Dean read it he smiled and said, ‘It will do very well for a school essay, but—’ and then he smiled again. It was not the smile I liked, either. It had ‘too much Priest in it,’ as Aunt Elizabeth would say. I felt—and feel—horribly cast down about it. It seemed to say, ‘You can scribble amusingly, my dear, and