Lucy Montgomery: Emily's Quest

"But the worst slam of all came from Cousin Jimmy, who had chuckled over Fools of Habit.

"'Never mind old Beulah, pussy,' he whispered. 'That was fine. You certainly did her up brown in Aunt Kate. I recognized her before I'd read a page. Knew her by her nose.' There you are! I unluckily happened to dower Aunt Kate with a 'long, drooping nose.' Nor can it be denied that Cousin Beulah's nose is long AND drooping. People have been hanged on no clearer circumstantial evidence. It was of no use to wail despairingly that I had never even thought of Cousin Beulah. Cousin Jimmy just nodded and chuckled again.

"'Of course. Best to keep it quiet. Best to keep anything like that pretty quiet.'

"The worst sting in all this is, that if Aunt Kate is really like Cousin Beulah Grant then I failed egregiously in what I was trying to do.

"However, I feel much better now than when I began this entry. I've got quite a bit of resentment and rebellion and discouragement out of my system.

"That's the chief use of a diary, I believe."

"FEB. 3, 19...

"This was a 'big day.' I had three acceptances. And one editor asked me to send him some stories. To be sure, I hate having an editor ask me to send a story, somehow. It's far worse than sending them unasked. The humiliation of having them returned after all is far deeper than when one just sends off a MS. to some dim impersonality behind an editorial desk a thousand miles away.

"And I have decided that I can't write a story 'to order.' 'Tis a diabolical task. I tried to lately. The editor of Young People asked me to write a story along certain lines. I wrote it. He sent it back, pointing out some faults and asking me to rewrite it. I tried to. I wrote and rewrote and altered and interlined until my MS. looked like a crazy patchwork of black and blue and red inks. Finally I lifted one of the covers of the kitchen stove and dumped in the original yarn and all my variations thereof.

"After this I'm just going to write what I want to. And the editors can be... canonized!

"There are northern lights and a misty new moon to-night."

"FEB. 16, 19...

"My story What the Jest Was Worth was in The Home Monthly to-day. But I was only one of 'others' on the cover. However, to balance that I have been listed by name as 'one of the well-known and popular contributors for the coming year' in Girlhood Days. Cousin Jimmy has read this editor's foreword over half a dozen times and I heard him murmuring 'well-known and popular' as he split the kindlings. Then he went to the corner store and bought me a new Jimmy-book. Every time I pass a new milestone on the Alpine path Cousin Jimmy celebrates by giving me a new Jimmy-book. I never buy a notebook for myself. It would hurt his feelings. He always looks at the little pile of Jimmy-books on my writing-table with awe and reverence, firmly believing that all sorts of wonderful literature is locked up in the hodge-podge of description and characters and 'bits' they contain.

"I always give Dean my stories to read. I can't help doing it, although he always brings them back with no comment, or, worse than no comment... faint praise. It has become a sort of obsession with me to MAKE Dean admit I CAN write something worth while in its line. THAT would be triumph. But unless and until he does, everything will be dust and ashes. Because... he KNOWS."

"April 2, 19...

"The spring has affected a certain youth of Shrewsbury who comes out to New Moon occasionally. He is not a suitor of whom the House of Murray approves. Nor, which is more important, one of whom E. B. Starr approves. Aunt Elizabeth was very grim because I went to a concert with him. She was sitting up when I came home.

"'You see I haven't eloped, Aunt Elizabeth,' I said. 'I promise you I won't. If I ever want to marry any one I'll tell you so and marry him in spite of your teeth.'

"I don't know whether Aunt Elizabeth went to bed with an easier mind or not. Mother eloped... thank goodness!... and Aunt Elizabeth is a firm believer in heredity."

"April 15, 19...

"This evening I went away up the hill and prowled about the Disappointed House by moonlight. The Disappointed House was built thirty-seven years ago... partly built, at least... for a bride who never came to it. There it has been ever since, boarded up, unfinished, heart-broken, haunted by the timid, forsaken ghosts of things that should have happened but never did. I always feel so sorry for it. For its poor blind eyes that have never seen... that haven't even memories. No homelight ever shone out through them... only once, long ago, a gleam of firelight. It might have been such a nice little house, snuggled against that wooded hill, pulling little spruces all around it to cover it. A warm, friendly little house. And a good-natured little house. Not like the new one at the Corner that Tom Semple is putting up. IT is a bad-tempered house. Vixenish, with little eyes and sharp elbows. It's odd how much personality a house can have even before it is ever lived in at all. Once long ago, when Teddy and I were children, we pried a board off the window and climbed in and made a fire in the fireplace. Then we sat there and planned out our lives. We meant to spend them together in that very house. I suppose Teddy has forgotten all about that childish nonsense. He writes often and his letters are full and jolly and Teddy-like. And he tells me all the little things I want to know about his life. But lately they have become rather impersonal, it seems to me. They might just as well have been written to Ilse as to me.

"Poor little Disappointed House. I suppose you will always be disappointed."

"May 1, 19...

"Spring again! Young poplars with golden, ethereal leaves. Leagues of rippling gulf beyond the silver-and-lilac sand-dunes.

"The winter has gone with a swiftness incredible, in spite of some terrible, black three-o'clocks and lonely, discouraged twilights. Dean will soon be home from Florida. But neither Teddy nor Ilse is coming home this summer. This gave me a white night or two recently. Ilse is going to the coast to visit an aunt... a mother's sister who never took any notice of her before. And Teddy has got the chance of illustrating a series of North-west Mounted Police stories for a New York firm and must spend his holidays making sketches for it in the far North. Of course it's a splendid chance for him and I wouldn't be a bit sorry... if HE seemed a bit sorry because he wasn't coming to Blair Water. But he didn't.

"Well, I suppose Blair Water and the old life here are to him as a tale that is told now.

"I didn't realize how much I had been building on Ilse and Teddy being here for the summer or how much the hope of it had helped me through a few bad times in the winter. When I let myself remember that not once this summer will I hear Teddy's signal whistle in Lofty John's bush... not once happen on him in our secret, beautiful haunts of lane and brookside... not once exchange a thrilling, significant glance in a crowd when something happened which had a special meaning for us, all the colour seems to die out of life, leaving it just a drab, faded thing of shreds and patches.

"Mrs. Kent met me at the post-office yesterday and stopped to speak... something she very rarely does. She hates me as much as ever.

"'I suppose you have heard that Teddy is not coming home this summer?'

"'Yes,' I said briefly.

"There was a certain odd, aching triumph in her eyes as she turned away... a triumph I understood. She is very unhappy because Teddy will not be home for HER but she is exultant that he will not be home for ME. This shows, she is almost sure, that he cares nothing about me.