such a thing—though of course I didn’t say that to Mrs. DeGeer. For one thing it would have hurt her feelings, and for another she wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what I meant. Even Aunt Elizabeth hadn’t when I told her my reasons for refusing, after Mrs. DeGeer had gone.
“‘You are always writing yards of trash that nobody wants,’ she said. ‘I think you might write something that is wanted. It would have pleased poor old Mary DeGeer. ‘Desecration of your art’ indeed. If you must talk, Emily, why not talk sense?’
“I proceeded to talk sense.
“‘Aunt Elizabeth,’ I said seriously, ‘how could I write that obituary poem for her? I couldn’t write an untruthful one to please anybody. And you know yourself that nothing good and truthful could be said about old Peter DeGeer!’
“Aunt Elizabeth did know it, and it posed her, but she was all the more displeased with me for that. She vexed me so much that I came up to my room and wrote an ‘obituary poem’ about Peter, just for my own satisfaction. It is certainly great fun to write a truthful obituary of some one you don’t like. Not that I disliked Peter DeGeer; I just despised him as everybody did. But Aunt Elizabeth had annoyed me, and when I am annoyed I can write very sarcastically. And again I felt that Something was writing through me—but a very different Something from the usual one—a malicious, mocking Something that enjoyed making fun of poor, lazy, shiftless, lying, silly, hypocritical, old Peter DeGeer. Ideas—words—rhymes—all seemed to drop into place while that Something chuckled.
“I thought the poem was so clever that I couldn’t resist the temptation to take it to school today and show it to Mr. Carpenter. I thought he would enjoy it—and I think he did, too, in a way, but after he had read it he laid it down and looked at me.
“I suppose there is a pleasure in satirizing a failure,’ he said. ‘Poor old Peter was a failure—and he is dead—
