Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery Page A

cloud he pointed out to me looked exactly like an angel flying along the pale, shining sky and carrying a baby in its arms. There was a filmy blue veil over its head with a faint, first star gleaming through it. Its wings were tipped with gold and its white robe flecked with crimson.
    “‘There goes the Angel of the Evening Star with tomorrow in its arms,’ said Dean.
    “It was so beautiful that it gave me one of my wonder moments. But ten seconds later it had changed into something that looked like a camel with an exaggerated hump!
    “We had a wonderful half hour, even if Mrs. Price, who couldn’t see anything in the sky, did think us quite mad.
    “Well, it all comes to this, there’s no Ilse trying to live in other people’s opinions. The only thing to do is to live in your own. After all, I believe in myself. I’m not so bad and silly as they think me, and I’m not consumptive, and I
can
write. Now that I’ve written it all out I feel differently about it. The only thing that still aggravates me is that Miss Potter
pitied
me – pitied by a Potter!
    “I looked out of my window just now and saw Cousin Jimmy’s nasturtium bed – and suddenly the flash came – and Miss Potter and her pity, and her malicious tongue seemed to matter not at all. Nasturtiums, who coloured you, you wonderful, glowing things? You must have been fashioned out of summer sunsets.
    “I help Cousin Jimmy a great deal with his garden this summer. I think I love it as much as he does. Every day we make new discoveries of bud and bloom.
    “So Aunt Elizabeth won’t send me to Shrewsbury! Oh, I feel as disappointed as if I’d really hoped she would. Every door in life seems shut to me.
    “Still, after all, I’ve lots to be thankful for. Aunt Elizabeth will let me go to school another year here, I think, and Mr. Carpenter can teach me heaps yet; I’m not hideous; moonlight is still a fair thing; I’m going to do something with my pen some day –
and
I’ve got a lovely, grey, moon-faced cat who has just jumped up on my table and poked my pen with his nose as a signal that I’ve written enough for one sitting.
    “The only real cat is a grey cat!”

HALF A LOAF
    O ne late August evening Emily heard Teddy’s signal whistle from the Tomorrow Road, and slipped out to join him. He had news – that was evident from his shining eyes.
    “Emily,” he cried excitedly, “I’m going to Shrewsbury after all! Mother told me this evening she had made up her mind to let me go!”
    Emily was glad – with a queer sorriness underneath, for which she reproached herself. How lonesome it would be at New Moon when her three old pals were gone! She had not realised until that moment how much she had counted on Teddy’s companionship. He had always been there in the background of her thoughts of the coming year. She had always taken Teddy for granted. Now there would be nobody – not even Dean, for Dean was going away for the winter as usual – to Egypt or Japan, as he might decide at the last moment. What would she do? Would all the Jimmy-books in the world take the place of her flesh-and-blood chums?
    “If you were only going, too!” said Teddy, as they walked along the Tomorrow Road – which was almost a Today Roadnow, so fast and so tall had the leafy young maples grown.
    “There’s no Ilse wishing it – don’t speak of it – it makes me unhappy,” said Emily jerkily.
    “Well, we’ll have week-ends anyhow. And it’s you I have to thank for going. It was what you said to Mother that night in the graveyard that made her let me go. I know she’s been thinking of it ever since, by things she would say every once in a while. One day last week I heard her muttering: ‘It’s awful to be a mother – awful to be a mother and suffer like this. Yet she called me selfish!’ And another time she said, ‘Is it selfish to want to keep the only thing you have left in the world?’ But she was lovely tonight when she told me I could go. I know