“Have you forgotten what came of sending Juliet to Queen’s?” she asked significantly.
If Emily was not allowed to take up the Entrance classes, Perry had no one to say him nay and he went at them with the same dogged determination he showed in all other matters. Perry’s status at New Moon had changed subtly and steadily. Aunt Elizabeth had ceased to refer scornfully to him as “a hired boy.” Even she recognised that though he was still indubitably a hired boy he was not going to remain one, and she no longer objected to Laura’s patching up his ragged bits of clothing, or to Emily’s helping him with his lessons in the kitchen after supper, nor did she growl when Cousin Jimmy began to pay him a certain small wage—though older boys than Perry were still glad to put in the winter months choring for board and lodging in some comfortable home. If a future premier was in the making at New Moon Aunt Elizabeth wanted to have some small share in the making. It was credible and commendable that a boy should have ambitions. A girl was an entirely different matter. A girl’s place was at home.
Emily helped Perry work out algebra problems and heard his lessons in French and Latin. She picked up more thus than Aunt Elizabeth would have approved and more still when the Entrance pupils talked those languages in school. It was quite an easy matter for a girl who had once upon a time invented a language of her own. When George Bates, by way of showing off, asked her one day in French—his French, of which Mr. Carpenter had once said doubtfully that perhaps God might understand it—“Have you the ink of my grandmother and the shoebrush of my cousin and the umbrella of my aunt’s husband in your desk?” Emily retorted quite as glibly and quite as Frenchily, “No, but I have the pen of your father and the cheese of the innkeeper and the towel of your uncle’s maidservant in my basket.”
