Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/50

26 such flagrant disregard of the decent required pieties, enlarged upon her programme. At the end of which she added that if there were any so lost to a sense of the meaning of the day as to wish to spend it otherwise, they might stand that the whole school might observe them. And be it said to her eternal glory, of the two terrified objects of her anathema Emily stood alone.

The derelict took the afternoon stage home, causing panic in her family by such a spirit of 1776, but the matter was finally arranged, and she was allowed to be returned, unconvinced and unrepentant.

When one of South Hadley's ardent lovers asked permission in recent years to raise a tablet to her memory there, the question hovered amusingly as to her heresy of youth. It would be interesting to know what Miss Lyon thought of her with her conflicting elements of shyness and fixed certainty of right and wrong, which established her own code regardless of her superior's opinion.

From a mere child Emily had been a newspaper reader, and heard much discussion of politics and world affairs at her father's table. She missed this during her cloistered life with mere femininity, and once in an outburst of smothered intelligence wrote her brother Austin—in mock despair—

Please tell me who the candidate for President is! I have been trying to find out ever since your last visit, and have not succeeded. I know no more about the affairs of the outside world here than if I were in a trance. Was the Mexican War terminated? Is any nation about to besiege South Hadley?

Certainly the term "feminist" was unheard of then, but in this alert young mind there was a latent tendency stirring already toward indignation at being counted as