Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/25

 burn walks in the light of her God’s countenance, every day, and shines with it.

“I have written myself out for tonight, and am going to bed. I know I have ‘wasted words’ in this diary—another of my literary faults, according to Mr. Carpenter.

“‘You waste words, Jade—you spill them about too lavishly. Economy and restraint—that’s what you need.’

“He’s right, of course, and in my essays and stories I try to practise what he preaches. But in my diary, which nobody sees but myself, or ever will see until after I’m dead, I like just to let myself go.”

Emily looked at her candle—it, too, was almost burned out. She knew she could not have another that night—Aunt Elizabeth’s rules were as those of Mede and Persian: she put away her diary in the little right-hand cupboard above the mantel, covered her dying fire, undressed and blew out her candle. The room slowly filled with the faint, ghostly snow-light of a night when a full moon is behind the driving storm-clouds. And just as Emily was ready to slip into her high black bedstead a sudden inspiration came—a splendid new idea for a story. For a minute she shivered reluctantly: the room was getting cold. But the idea would not be denied. Emily slipped her hand between the feather tick of her bed and the chaff mattress and produced a half-burned candle, secreted there for just such an emergency.

It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.

She lighted her candle, put on her stockings and a heavy coat, got out another half-filled Jimmy-book, and began to write by the single, uncertain candle which made a pale oasis of light in the shadows of the room. In that oasis Emily wrote, her black head bent over her book, as the hours of night crept away and the other occupants of New