He transfixed her with another glare. But Emily was beginning to pick herself up a bit. Nevertheless, she suddenly felt oddly ashamed of the very elevated and unselfish desires expressed in that sonnet.
“No—o,” she answered reluctantly. “I do want rainbow joy—lots of it.”
“Of course you do. We all do. We don’t get it—you won’t get it—but don’t be hypocrite enough to pretend you don’t want it, even in a sonnet. Lines to a Mountain Cascade— ‘On its dark rocks like the whiteness of a veil around a bride’—Where did you see a mountain cascade in Prince Edward Island?”
“Nowhere—there’s a picture of one in Dr. Burnley’s library.”
“A Wood Stream—
‘The threading sunbeams quiver,
The bending bushes shiver,
O’er the little shadowy river’—
There’s only one more rhyme that occurs to me and that’s ‘liver.’ Why did you leave it out?”
Emily writhed.
“Wind Song—
‘I have shaken the dew in the meadows
From the clover’s creamy gown’—
Pretty, but weak. June—June, for heaven’s sake, girl, don’t write poetry on June. It’s the sickliest subject in the world. It’s been written to death.”
“No, June is immortal,” cried Emily suddenly, a mutinous sparkle replacing the strained look in her eyes. She was not going to let Mr. Carpenter have it all his own way.
But Mr. Carpenter had tossed June aside without reading a line of it.
“‘I weary of the hungry world’—what do you know
