Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [4]
The A.V.I.S. was, it seemed, dead. It had petered out soon after Anne’s marriage.
‘They just couldn’t keep it up, Anne. The young people in Avonlea now are not what they were in our day.’
‘Don’t talk as if “our day” were ended, Diana. We’re only fifteen years old and kindred spirits. The air isn’t just full of light… it is light. I’m not sure that I haven’t sprouted wings.’
‘I feel just that way, too,’ said Diana, forgetting that she had tipped the scale at one hundred and fifty-five that morning. ‘I often feel that I’d love to be turned into a bird for a little while. It must be wonderful to fly.’
Beauty was all around them. Unsuspected tintings glimmered in the dark demesnes of the woods and glowed in their alluring byways. The spring sunshine sifted through the young green leaves. Gay trills of song were everywhere. There were little hollows where you felt as if you were bathing in a pool of liquid gold. At every turn some fresh spring scent struck their faces… spice ferns… fir balsam… the wholesome odour of newly ploughed fields. There was a lane curtained with wild cherry blossoms; a grassy old field full of tiny spruce-trees just starting in life and looking like elvish things that had squatted down among the grasses; brooks not yet ‘too broad for leaping’; starflowers under the firs… sheets of curly young ferns… and a birch-tree whence some vandal hand had torn away the white skin wrapper in several places, exposing the tints of the bark below. Anne looked at it so long that Diana wondered. She did not see what Anne did… tints ranging from purest creamy white, through exquisite golden tones, growing deeper and deeper until the inmost layer revealed the deepest, richest brown as if to tell that all birches so maiden-like and cool exteriorly, had yet warm-hued feelings.
‘The primeval fire of earth at their hearts,’ murmured Anne.
And finally, after traversing a little wood glen full of toadstools, they found Hester Gray’s garden. Not so much changed. It was still very sweet with dear flowers. There were still plenty of June lilies, as Diana called the narcissi. The row of cherry-trees had grown older, but was a drift of snowy bloom. You could still find the central rose walk, and the old dyke was white with strawberry blossoms and blue with violets and green with baby fern. They ate their picnic supper in a corner of it, sitting on some old mossy stones, with a lilac-tree behind them flinging purple banners against a low-hanging sun. Both were hungry and both did justice to their own good cooking.
‘How nice things taste out of doors,’ sighed Diana comfortably. ‘That chocolate cake of yours, Anne… well, words fail me, but I must get the recipe. Fred would adore it. He can eat anything and stay thin. I’m always saying I’m not going to eat any more cake, because I’m getting fatter every year. I’ve such a horror of getting like Great-aunt Sarah, she was so fat she always had to be pulled up when she sat down. But when I see a cake like that, and last night at the reception… well, they would all have been so offended if I didn’t eat.’
‘Did you have a nice time?’
‘Oh, yes, in a way. But I fell into Fred’s Cousin Henrietta’s clutches and it’s such a delight to her to tell all about her operations and her sensations while going through them, and how soon