"The results of the prize poem competition were announced to-day. Evelyn Blake is the winner with a poem entitled A Legend of Abegweit.
"There isn't anything to say... so I say it.
"Besides, Aunt Ruth has said everything!
"December 15, 19...
"Evelyn's prize poem was printed in the Times this week with her photograph and a biographical sketch. The set of Parkman is on exhibition in the windows of the Booke Shoppe.
"A Legend of Abegweit IS a fairly good poem. It is in ballad style, and rhythm and rhyme are correct... which could not be said of any other poem of Evelyn's I've ever seen.
"Evelyn Blake has said of everything of mine she ever saw in print that she was sure I copied it from somewhere. I hate to imitate her... but I KNOW that SHE never wrote that poem. It isn't any expression of HER at all. She might as well have imitated Dr. Hardy's handwriting and claimed it as her own. Her mincing, copperplate script is as much like Dr. Hardy's black, forcible scrawl as that poem is like HER.
"Besides, though A Legend of Abegweit is fairly good it is NOT as good as Wild Grapes.
"I am not going to say so to anyone but down it goes in this journal. Because it's TRUE.
"December 20, 19...
"I showed A Legend of Abegweit and Wild Grapes to Mr. Carpenter. When he had read them both he said, 'Who were the judges?'
"I told him.
"'Give them my compliments and tell them they're asses.' he said.
"I feel comforted. I won't tell the judges... or anyone... that they're asses. But it soothes me to know they are.
"The strange thing is... Aunt Elizabeth asked to see Wild Grapes and when she had read it she said,
"'I am no judge of poetry, of course, but it seems to me that YOURS is of a HIGHER ORDER.'
"Jan. 4, 19...
"I spent the Christmas week at Uncle Oliver's. I didn't like it. It was too noisy. I would have liked it years ago but they never asked me then. I had to eat when I wasn't hungry... play parchesi when I didn't want to... talk when I wanted to be silent. I was never alone for one moment all the time I was there. Besides, Andrew is getting to be such a nuisance. And Aunt Addie was odiously kind and motherly. I just felt all the time like a cat who is held on a lap where it doesn't want to be and gently, firmly stroked. I had to sleep with Jen, who is my first cousin and just my age, and who thinks in her heart I'm not half good enough for Andrew but is going to try, with the blessing of God, to make the best of it. Jen is a nice, sensible girl and she and I are friendish. That is a word of my own coining. Jen and I are more than mere acquaintances but not really friendly. We will always be friendish and never more than friendish. We don't talk the same language.
"When I got home to dear New Moon I went up to my room and shut the door and revelled in solitude.
"School opened yesterday. To-day in the Booke Shoppe I had an internal laugh. Mrs. Rodney and Mrs. Elder were looking over some books and Mrs. Elder said,
"'That story in the Times... A Bleeding Heart... was the strangest one I ever read. It wandered on, chapter after chapter, for weeks, and never seemed to get anywhere, and then it just finished up in eight chapters LICKETY-SPLIT. I can't understand it.'
"I could have solved the mystery for her but I didn't."
CHAPTER 20. IN THE OLD JOHN HOUSE
When The Woman Who Spanked the King was accepted and published by a New York magazine of some standing, quite a sensation was produced in Blair Water and Shrewsbury, especially when the incredible news was whispered from lip to lip that Emily had actually been paid forty dollars for it. For the first time her clan began to take her writing mania with some degree of seriousness and Aunt Ruth gave up, finally and for ever, all slurs over wasted time. The acceptance came at the psychological moment when the sands of Emily's faith were running rather low. All the fall and winter her stuff had been coming back to her, except from two magazines whose editors evidently thought that literature was its own reward and quite independent of degrading monetary considerations. At first she had always felt dreadfully when a poem or story over which she had agonized came back with one of those icy little rejection slips or a few words of faint praise... the "but" rejections, Emily called these, and hated them worse than the printed ones. Tears of disappointment WOULD come. But after a time she got hardened to it and didn't mind... so much. She only gave the editorial slip the Murray look and said "I will succeed." And never at any time had she any REAL doubt that she would. Down, deep down, something told her that her time would come. So, though she flinched momentarily at each rejection, as from the flick of a whip, she sat down and... wrote another story.
Still, her inner voice had grown rather faint under so many discouragements. The acceptance of The Woman Who Spanked the King suddenly raised it into a joyous paean of certainty again. The cheque meant much, but the storming of that magazine much more. She felt that she was surely winning a foothold. Mr. Carpenter chuckled over it and told her it really was "absolutely good."
"The best in this story belongs to Mistress McIntyre," said Emily ruefully. "I can't call it mine."
"The setting is yours... and what you've added harmonizes perfectly with your foundation. And you didn't polish hers up too much... THAT shows the artist. Weren't you tempted to?"
"Yes. There were so many places I thought I COULD improve it a good deal."
"But you didn't try to... THAT makes it yours," said Mr. Carpenter... and left her to puzzle his meaning out for herself.
Emily spent thirty-five of her dollars so sensibly that even Aunt Ruth herself couldn't find fault with her budget. But with the remaining five she bought a set of Parkman. It was a much nicer set than the prize one... which the donor had really picked out of a mail-order list... and Emily felt much prouder of it than if it had been the prize. After all, it was better to earn things for yourself. Emily has those Parkmans yet... somewhat faded and frayed now, but dearer to her than all the other volumes in her library. For a few weeks she was very happy and uplifted. The Murrays were proud of her. Principal Hardy had congratulated her, a local elocutionist of some repute had read her story at a concert in Charlottetown. And, most wonderful of all, a far-away reader in Mexico had written her a letter telling her what pleasure The Woman Who Spanked the King had given him. Emily read and re-read that letter until she knew it off by heart, and slept with it under her pillow. No lover's missive was ever more tenderly treated.
Then the affair of the old John house came up like a thunder-cloud and darkened all her cerulean sky.
There was a concert and "pie social" at Derry Pond one Friday night and Ilse had been asked to recite. Dr. Burnley took Ilse and Emily and Perry and Teddy over in his big, double-seated sleigh, and they had a gay and merry eight miles' drive through the soft snow that was beginning to fall. When the concert was half over, Dr. Burnley was summoned out. There was sudden and serious illness in a Derry Pond household. The doctor went, telling Teddy that he must drive the party home. Dr. Burnley made no bones about it. They might have silly rules about chaperonage in Shrewsbury and Charlottetown, but in Blair Water and Derry Pond they did not obtain. Teddy and Perry were decent boys... Emily was a Murray... Ilse was no fool. The doctor would have summed them up thus tersely if he had thought about it at all.
When the concert was over they left for home. It was snowing very thickly now and the wind was rising rapidly, but the first three miles of the road were through sheltering woods and were not unpleasant. There was a wild, weird beauty in the snow-coated ranks of trees, standing in the pale light of the moon behind the storm-clouds. The sleigh-bells laughed at the shriek of the wind far overhead. Teddy managed the doctor's team without difficulty. Once or twice Emily had a strong suspicion that he was using only one arm to drive them. She wondered if he had noticed that evening that she wore her hair really "up" for the first time... in a soft ebon "Psyche knot" under her crimson hat. Emily thought again that there was something quite delightful about a storm.