Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/78

 across the kitchen and vanished through the sitting-room door, just as Aunt Elizabeth came up the sandstone steps with dignified apologies for keeping them waiting. Miss Potter and Mrs. Ann Cyrilla were so dumbfounded that they were hardly able to talk about the Ladies’ Aid, and got themselves confusedly away after a few jerky questions and answers. Aunt Elizabeth did not know what to make of them and thought they must have been unreasonably offended over having to wait. Then she dis- missed the matter from her mind. A Murray did not care what Potters thought or did. The open closet door told no tales, and she did not know that up in the lookout chamber Emily was lying face downward across the bed crying passionately for shame and anger and humiliation. She felt degraded and hurt. It had all been the outcome of her own silly vanity in the beginning—she acknowledged that—but her punishment had been severe.

She did not mind so much what Miss Potter had said, but Mrs. Ann Cyrilla’s tiny barbs of malice sting. She had liked pretty, pleasant Mrs. Ann Cyrilla, who had always seemed kind and friendly and had paid her many compliments. She had thought Mrs. Ann Cyrilla had really liked her. And now to find out that she would talk about her like this!

“Couldn’t they have said good thing of me?” she sobbed. “Oh, I feel, somehow—between my own silliness and their malice—and all dirty and messed-up mentally. Will I ever feel again?”

She did not feel “clean” until she had written it all out in her diary. Then she took a less distorted view of it and summoned philosophy to her aid.

“Mr. Carpenter says we should make every experience teach us something,” she wrote. “He says every experience, no matter whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, has something for us if we are able to view it dispassionately. ‘That,’ he added bitterly, ‘is one of the pieces of good advice I have kept by me all my life and never been able to make any use of myself.’