Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [35]
‘Was he very dreadful, Trix?’
‘He – he wasn’t dreadful at all,’ admitted Trix sheepishly. ‘He just snorted, and said it was about time Johnny came to the point, after hanging around for two years and keeping everyone else away. I think he felt he couldn’t go into another spell of sulks so soon after the last one. And you know, Anne, between sulks Papa really is an old duck.’
‘I think he is a great deal better father to you than you deserve,’ said Anne, quite in Rebecca Dew’s manner. ‘You were simply outrageous at that dinner, Trix.’
‘Well, you know you started it,’ said Trix, ‘and good old Pringle helped a bit. All’s well that ends well – and thank goodness I’ll never have to dust that vase again!’
11
Extract from a letter to Gilbert two weeks later
Esme Taylor’s engagement to Dr Lennox Carter is announced. By all I can gather from various bits of local gossip I think he decided that fatal Friday night that he wanted to protect her and save her from her father and her family – and perhaps from her friends! Her plight evidently appealed to his sense of chivalry. Trix persists in thinking I was the means of bringing it about, and perhaps I did take a hand; but I don’t think I’ll ever try an experiment like that again. It’s too much like picking up a lightning flash by the tail.
I really don’t know what got into me, Gilbert. It must have been a hang-over from my old detestation of anything savouring of Pringleism. It does seem old now. I’ve almost forgotten it. But other folks are still wondering. I hear Miss Valentine Courtaloe says she isn’t at all surprised I have won the Pringles over, because I have ‘such a way with me’; and the minister’s wife thinks it is an answer to the prayer she put up. Well, who knows but that it was?
Jen Pringle and I walked part of the way home from school yesterday, and talked of ‘shoes and ships and sealing-wax’ – of almost everything but geometry. We avoid that subject. Jen knows I don’t know too much about geometry, but my one wee bit of knowledge about Captain Myrom balances that. I lent Jen my Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I hate to lend a book I love; it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me. But I love Foxe’s Martyrs only because dear Mrs Allan gave it to me for a Sunday School prize years ago. I don’t like reading about martyrs, because they always make me feel petty and ashamed – ashamed to admit I hate to get out of bed on frosty mornings and shrink from a visit to the dentist.
Well, I’m glad Esme and Trix are both happy. Since my own little romance is in flower I am all the more interested in other people’s. A nice interest, you know. Not curious or malicious, but just glad there’s such a lot of happiness spread about.
It’s still February, and ‘on the convent roof the snows are sparkling to the moon’. Only it isn’t a convent; just the roof of Mr Hamilton’s barn. But I’m beginning to think, ‘Only a few more weeks till spring, and a few more weeks then till summer – and holidays – and Green Gables – and golden sunlight on Avonlea meadows – and a gulf that will be silver at dawn and sapphire at noon and crimson at sunset – and you.’
Little Elizabeth and I have no end of plans for spring. We are such good friends. I take her her milk every evening, and once in so long she is allowed to go for a walk with me. We have discovered that our birthdays are on the same day, and Elizabeth flushed ‘divinest rosy red’ with the excitement of it. She is so sweet when she blushes. Ordinarily she is far too pale, and doesn’t get any pinker because of the new milk. Only when we come back from our twilight trysts with evening winds does she have a lovely rose colour in her little cheeks. Once she asked me gravely, ‘Will I have a lovely creamy skin like yours when I grow up, Miss Shirley, if I put buttermilk on my face every night?’ Buttermilk