Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/358

 He transfixed her with another glare. But Emily was beginning to pick herself up a bit. Nevertheless, she suddenly felt oddly ashamed of the very elevated and unselfish desires expressed in that sonnet.

“No—o,” she answered reluctantly. “I want rainbow joy—lots of it.”

“Of course you do. We all do. We don’t get it—you won’t get it—but don’t be hypocrite enough to pretend you don’t want it, even in a sonnet. — ‘On its dark rocks like the whiteness of a veil around a bride’—Where did you see a mountain cascade in Prince Edward Island?”

“Nowhere—there’s a picture of one in Dr. Burnley’s library.”

“—

There’s only one more rhyme that occurs to me and that’s ‘liver.’ Why did you leave it out?”

Emily writhed.

“—

Pretty, but weak. —June, for heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write poetry on June. It’s the sickliest subject in the world. It’s been written to death.”

“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr. Carpenter have it all his own way.

But Mr. Carpenter had tossed aside without reading a line of it.

“‘I weary of the hungry world’—what do you know