Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/95

 that life would not be very easy under Aunt Ruth’s roof. And then she must write no more stories.

To feel within her the creative urge and be forbidden to express it—to tingle with delight in the conception of humorous or dramatic characters, and be forbidden to bring them into existence—to be suddenly seized with the idea of a capital plot and realise immediately afterward that you couldn’t develop it. All this was a torture which no one who has not been born with the fatal itch for writing can realise. The Aunt Elizabeths of the world can never understand it. To them, it is merely foolishness.

Those last two weeks of August were busy ones at New Moon. Elizabeth and Laura held long conferences over Emily’s clothes. She must have an outfit that would cast no discredit on the Murrays, but common sense and not fashion was to give the casting vote. Emily herself had no say in the matter. Laura and Elizabeth argued “from noon to dewy eve” one day as to whether Emily might have a taffeta silk blouse—Ilse had three—and decided against it, much to Emily’s disappointment. But Laura had her way in regard to what she dared not call an “evening dress,” since the name would have doomed it in Elizabeth’s opinion: it was a very pretty crêpe thing, of a pinkish-grey—the shade, I think, which was then called ashes-of-roses—and was made collarless—a great concession on Elizabeth’s part—with the big puffed sleeves that look very absurd today, but which, like every other fashion, were pretty and piquant when worn by the youth and beauty of their time. It was the prettiest dress Emily had ever had—and the longest, which meant much in those days, when you could not be grown up until you had put on “long” dresses. It came to her pretty ankles.

She put it on one evening, when Laura and Elizabeth were away, because she wanted Dean to see her in it. He had come up to spend the evening with her—he was off the next day, having decided on Egypt—and they walked in the garden. Emily felt quite old and sophisticated