Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [79]
‘Lepers, dear, not leopards.’
‘Jenny said leopards. I guess she ought to know, since it is her aunt. And there are so many things at her house I want to see… her room is papered with parrots… and their parlour is full of stuffed owls… and they have a hooked rug with a house on it in the hall… and window blinds just covered with roses… and a real house to play in… her uncle built it for them… and her Granny lives with them and is the oldest person in the world. Jenny says she lived before the flood. I may never have another chance to see a person who lived before the flood.’
‘The grandmother is close on a hundred, I am told,’ said Susan, ‘but if your Jenny said she lived before the flood she is fibbing. You would be likely to catch goodness knows what if you went to a place like that.’
‘They’ve had everything they could have long ago,’ protested Di. ‘Jenny says they’ve had mumps and measles and whooping cough and scarlet fever all in one year.’
‘I wouldn’t put it past them having the smallpox,’ muttered Susan. ‘Talk of people being bewitched!’
‘Jenny has to have her tonsils out,’ sobbed Di. ‘But that isn’t catching, is it? Jenny had a cousin who died when she had her tonsils out… she bled to death without gaining conscious. So it is likely Jenny will too, if it runs in the family. She is delicate… she fainted three times last week. But she is quite prepared. And that is partly why she is so anxious to have me spend a night with her… so that I’d have it to remember after she passed away. Please, Mother. I’ll go without the new hat with ribbon streamers you promised if you’ll let me.’
But Mother was adamant and Di betook herself to a tearful pillow. Nan had no sympathy for her… Nan ‘had no use’ for Jenny Penny.
‘I don’t know what has got into the child,’ said Anne worriedly. ‘She has never behaved like this before. As you say, that Penny girl seems to have bewitched her.’
‘You were quite right in refusing to let her go to a place so far beneath her, Mrs Doctor dear.’
‘Oh, Susan, I don’t want her to feel that anyone is “beneath” her. But we must draw the line somewhere. It’s not Jenny so much… I think she is harmless enough apart from her habit of exaggeration… but I’m told the boys are really dreadful. The Mowbray Narrows teacher is at her wits’ end with them.’
‘Do they tryanize over you like that?’ asked Jenny loftily when Di told her she was not allowed to go. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone use me like that. I have too much spirit. Why, I sleep out of doors all night whenever I take the notion. I s’pose you’d never dream of doing that?’
Di looked wistfully at this mysterious girl who had ‘often slept out all night’. How wonderful!
‘You don’t blame me for not going, Jenny? You know I want to go?’
‘Of course I don’t blame you. Some girls wouldn’t put up with it, of course, but I s’pose you just can’t help it. We could have had fun. I’d planned we’d go fishing by moonlight in our back brook. We often do. I’ve caught trout that long. And we have the dearest little pigs and a new foal that’s just sweet and a litter of puppies. Well, I guess I must ask Sadie Taylor. Her father and mother let her call her soul her own.’
‘My father and mother are very good to me,’ protested Di loyally. ‘And my father is the best doctor in P.E. Island. Everyone says so.’
‘Putting on airs because you have a father and mother and I have none,’ said Jenny disdainfully. ‘Why, my father has wings and always wears a golden crown. But I don’t go about with my head in the air on that account, do I? Now, Di, I don’t want to quarrel with you, but I hate to hear anyone bragging about their folks. It’s not etiket. And I have made up my mind to be a lady. When that Persis Ford you’re always talking of comes to Four Winds this summer I am not going to ’sociate with her. There’s something queer about her ma, Aunt Lina says. She was married to a dead man and he come