Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [122]
‘If you ask me, Mrs Doctor dear, that Green child is a perfect minx,’ said Susan, all the more implacably because she had been so nearly fooled herself by Delilah’s eyes and manners. ‘The idea of her calling our cats mangy! I am not saying that there are not such things as tom cats, Mrs Doctor dear, but little girls should not talk of them. I am no lover of cats, but the Shrimp is seven years old and should at least be respected. And as for my potato pot…’
But Susan really couldn’t express her feelings about the potato pot!
In her room Di was reflecting that perhaps it was not too late to be ‘best friends’ with Laura Carr after all. Laura was true, even if she wasn’t very exciting. Di sighed. Some colour had gone out of life with her belief in Delilah’s piteous lot.
41
A bitter east wind was snarling around Ingleside like a shrewish old woman. It was one of those chill, drizzly, late August days that take the heart out of you, one of those days when everything goes wrong… what in old Avonlea days had been called ‘a Jonah day’. The new pup Gilbert had brought home for the boys had gnawed the enamel off the dining-table leg… Susan had found that the moths had been having a Roman holiday in the blanket closet… Nan’s new kitten had ruined the choicest fern… Jem and Bertie Shakespeare had been making the most abominable racket in the garret all the afternoon with tin pails for drums… Anne herself had broken a painted glass lamp shade. But somehow it had done her just good to hear it smash! Rilla had earache and Shirley had a mysterious rash on his neck which worried Anne but at which Gilbert only glanced casually and said in an absent-minded voice that he didn’t think it meant anything. Of course it didn’t mean anything to him! Shirley was only his own son. And it didn’t matter to him either that he had invited the Trents to dinner one evening last week and forgotten to tell Anne until they arrived. She and Susan had had an extra busy day and had planned a pick-up supper. And Mrs Trent with the reputation of being Charlottetown’s smartest hostess! Where were Walter’s stockings with the black tops and the blue toes? ‘Do you think, Walter, that you could, just for once, put a thing where it belongs? Nan, I don’t know where the Seven Seas are. For mercy’s sake stop asking questions! I don’t wonder they poisoned Socrates. They ought to have.’
Walter and Nan stared. Never had they heard their mother speak in such a tone before. Walter’s look annoyed Anne still more.
‘Diana, is it necessary to be forever reminding you not to twist your legs around the piano stool? Shirley, if you haven’t got that new magazine all sticky with jam! And perhaps somebody would be kind enough to tell me where the prisms of the hanging lamp have gone!’
Nobody could tell her… Susan having unhooked them and taken them out to wash them… and Anne whisked herself upstairs to escape from the grieved eyes of her children. In her own room she paced up and down feverishly. What was the matter with her? Was she turning into one of those peevish creatures who had no patience with anybody? Everything annoyed her these days. A little mannerism of Gilbert’s she had never minded before got on her nerves. She was sick and tired of never-ending, monotonous duties… sick and tired of catering to her family’s whims. Once everything she did for her house and household gave her delight. Now she did not seem to care what she did. She felt all the time like a creature in a nightmare, trying to overtake someone with fettered feet.
The worst of it all was that Gilbert never noticed that there was any change in her. He was busy night and day and seemed to care for nothing but his work. The only thing he had said at dinner that day had been, ‘Pass the mustard, please.’
‘I can talk to the chairs and tables, of course,’ thought Anne bitterly. ‘We’re just getting to be a sort of habit with each other… nothing else. He never noticed that I had on a new dress last night. And it’s so long since he called me “Anne-girl” that I’ve forgotten when. Well, I suppose