How _can_ Aunt Cordelia?--it throws one off--it upsets one.
Hattie chanced to be criticising Miss Beaton the next day, saying that
she required too little of her classes. "But then she is more concerned
getting ready to be married, I reckon," said Hattie.
"Oh," said Emily, "Hattie!" She was shocked, almost hurt, with Hattie.
"Don't you know about it?" she went on to explain. "She was going to be
married and--he--he never came--he was dead."
"No such thing," said Hattie. "He runs a feed store next my father's
office. We've got cards. It's the day after school's out."
"Then--which--" asked Emily falteringly.
"Why, I heard that the first of the year," said Hattie. "It was Miss
Carmichael that happened to."
Emily went off to herself. She felt bitter and cross and disposed to
blame Miss Beaton. She never wanted to see or to hear of Miss Beaton
again.
Upstairs she took from her Latin Grammar a pencilled paper, interlined
and much erased, and tore it into bits--viciously little bits. Then she
went and put them in the waste-paper basket.
"You just feel it and then you write," Margaret had said, and Emily was
feeling again, and deeply; later she wrote.
It was gloomy, that which wrote itself on the paper, nor did it
especially apply to the case in point, "but then," she reminded
herself, bitterly recalling the faithlessness of Hattie, of Rosalie, of
Miss Beaton, "it's True."
She took it to Hattie from some feeling that she was mixed up in this
thing. Hattie closed her Algebra, keeping her finger in the place, while
she took the paper and looked at it. She did not seem impressed or
otherwise, but read it aloud in a matter-of-fact tone:
"A flower sprang from the earth one day
And nodded and blew in a blithesome way,
And the warm sun filled its cup!
A careless hand broke it off and threw
It idly down where it lately grew,
And the same sun withered it up."
"'Up,'" said Hattie, "what's the up for? You don't need it."
"It's--it's for the rhyme," said Emily.
"It's redundancy," said Hattie.