Anne of Avonlea: Chapters 18–24

If you mean ECONOMICAL, it’s a VERY different thing from being stingy. It is an excellent trait in a person if she is economical.

In her joy Anne forgot the precarious nature of her footing, incautiously ceased to lean on the window sill, gave an impulsive little hop of pleasure...and the next moment she had crashed through the roof up to her armpits, and there she hung, quite unable to extricate herself.

Nevertheless, the result was quite pretty, and Diana was “enraptured” when Anne read it to her.

She looked as amazed as might be expected on seeing the curious tableau in her yard, but when she heard Diana’s explanation she was all sympathy.

He must be very tall and distinguished looking, with melancholy, inscrutable eyes, and a melting, sympathetic voice.

There was nothing either melancholy or inscrutable in Gilbert’s physiognomy, but of course that didn’t matter in friendship!

Gilbert was as yet little more than a boy; but a boy has his dreams as have others, and in Gilbert’s future there was always a girl with big, limpid gray eyes, and a face as fine and delicate as a flower.

In Gilbert’s eyes Anne’s greatest charm was the fact that she never stooped to the petty practices of so many of the Avonlea girls—the small jealousies, the little deceits and rivalries, the palpable bids for favor.

I’ve a treatise here on lawns and lawnmaking and I’m going to prepare a paper on the subject soon.

Anne caught the bottle containing the lotion from the shelf and copiously anointed her nose therewith by means of a little sponge sacred to the purpose.

At this auspicious moment a knock sounded at the kitchen door.

She greeted Priscilla and was introduced to her companions as calmly and composedly as if she had been arrayed in purple and fine linen.

The chicken was supplemented by light new bread, excellent butter and cheese, Marilla’s fruit cake and a dish of preserved plums, floating in their golden syrup as in congealed summer sunshine.

Anne’s hungry guests, however, did not seem to think anything was lacking and they ate the simple viands with apparent enjoyment.

She had seen much of men and women, and crystalized her experiences into witty little sentences and epigrams which made her hearers feel as if they were listening to one of the people in clever books.

But under all her sparkle there was a strongly felt undercurrent of true, womanly sympathy and kindheartedness which won affection as easily as her brilliancy won admiration.

Mrs. Pendexter said little; she merely smiled with her lovely eyes and lips, and ate chicken and fruit cake and preserves with such exquisite grace that she conveyed the impression of dining on ambrosia and honeydew.

The next day Mirabel Cotton was kept in at recess and “gently but firmly” given to understand that when you were so unfortunate as to possess an uncle who persisted in walking about houses after he had been decently interred it was not in good taste to talk about that eccentric gentleman to your deskmate of tender years.

“It doesn’t seem right to hurry through it, does it? It seems irreverent, like running in a church.”

The house was a low-eaved structure built of undressed blocks of red Island sandstone, with a little peaked roof out of which peered two dormer windows, with quaint wooden hoods over them, and two great chimneys.

They had unconsciously been expecting to see the usual type of elderly spinster as known to their experience...a rather angular personage, with prim gray hair and spectacles.

She was a little lady with snow-white hair beautifully wavy and thick, and carefully arranged in becoming puffs and coils.

Charlotta accordingly blew, a rather raucous, strident blast.

There was moment’s stillness...and then from the woods over the river came a multitude of fairy echoes, sweet, elusive, silvery, as if all the “horns of elfland” were blowing against the sunset.

Between her and Miss Lavendar had sprung up one of those fervent, helpful friendships possible only between a woman who has kept the freshness of youth in her heart and soul, and a girl whose imagination and intuition supplied the place of experience.

Anne had at last discovered a real “kindred spirit,” while into the little lady’s lonely, sequestered life of dreams Anne and Diana came with the wholesome joy and exhilaration of the outer existence, which Miss Lavendar, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” had long ceased to share; they brought an atmosphere of youth and reality to the little stone house.

Nevertheless, Anne keenly enjoyed her walk through the great gray maze of the beechlands; though alone she never found it lonely; her imagination peopled her path with merry companions, and with these she carried on a gay, pretended conversation that was wittier and more fascinating than conversations are apt to be in real life, where people sometimes fail most lamentably to talk up to the requirements.

"...Anne, my dear, I’m sorry to say” ...Miss Lavendar dropped her voice as if she were about to confess a predilection for murdering people, “that I am a dreadfully sulky person..."

Gilbert Blythe, aided and abetted by Anne, had written the notes, putting in the one about himself as a blind.

Only two of the notes have any bearing on this history...

Life in Avonlea continued on the smooth and even tenor of its way.

Marilla looked scandalized and glanced apprehensively around to make sure the twins were not within earshot.

That spring Marilla, by way of turning Davy’s passion for reveling in mud and clay into useful channels, had given him and Dora a small plot of ground for a garden.

Davy, however, worked with more zeal than discretion; he dug and hoed and raked and watered and transplanted so energetically that his seeds had no chance for their lives.

Davy, however, worked with more zeal than discretion; he dug and hoed and raked and watered and transplanted so energetically that his seeds had no chance for their lives.

In the northwest a mass of cloud, such as she had never in all her life beheld before, was rapidly rolling up. It was dead black, save where its curled and fringed edges showed a ghastly, livid white.

In three minutes every pane in the west and north windows was broken and the hail poured in through the apertures covering the floor with stones, the smallest of which was as big as a hen’s egg.

Marilla rose from her knees, weak and trembling, and dropped on her rocker. Her face was haggard and she looked ten years older.

The lightning knocked over the kitchen chimbly and come down the flue and knocked over Ginger’s cage and tore a hole in the floor and went into the sullar.

Uncle Abe forgot that he had ever denied setting the day. As for the trifling discrepancy in the hour, that was nothing.