Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [73]
But what an evening it was! What silvery-satin roads with a pale green sky in the west after a light snowfall! Orion was treading his stately march across the heavens, and hills and fields and woods lay around them in a pearly silence.
Katherine’s reading captured her audience from the first line, and at the party she could not find dances for all her would-be partners. She suddenly found herself laughing without bitterness. Then home to Green Gables, warming their toes at the sitting-room fire by the light of two friendly candles on the mantelpiece; and Mrs Lynde tiptoeing into their room, late as it was, to ask them if they’d like another blanket and to assure Katherine that her little dog was snug and warm in a basket behind the kitchen stove.
‘I’ve got a new outlook on life,’ thought Katherine, as she drifted off to slumber. ‘I didn’t know there were people like this.’
‘Come again,’ said Marilla, when she left. Marilla never said that to anyone unless she meant it.
‘Of course she’s coming again,’ said Anne. ‘For week-ends – and for weeks in the summer. We’ll build bonfires and hoe in the garden, and pick apples and go for the cows, and row on the pond and get lost in the woods. I want to show you little Hester Gray’s garden, Katherine, and Echo Lodge, and Violet Vale when it’s full of violets.’
7
Windy Willows
The street where ghosts (should) walk
January 5
MY ESTEEMED FRIEND,
That isn’t anything Aunt Chatty’s grandmother wrote. It’s only something she would have written if she’d thought of it.
I’ve made a New Year resolution to write sensible love-letters. Do you suppose such a thing is possible?
I have left dear Green Gables, but I have returned to dear Windy Willows. Rebecca Dew had a fire lighted in the tower room for me and a hot-water bottle in the bed.
I’m so glad I like Windy Willows. It would be dreadful to live in a place I didn’t like, that didn’t seem friendly to me, that didn’t say, ‘I’m glad you’re back.’ Windy Willows does. It’s a bit old-fashioned and a bit prim, but it likes me.
And I was glad to see Aunt Kate and Aunt Chatty and Rebecca Dew again. I can’t help seeing their funny sides, but I love them well for all that.
Rebecca Dew said such a nice thing to me yesterday: ‘Spook’s Lane has been a different place since you came here, Miss Shirley.’
I’m glad you liked Katherine, Gilbert. She was surprisingly nice to you. It’s amazing to find how nice she can be when she tries. And I think she is just as much amazed at it herself as anyone else. She had no idea it would be so easy.
It’s going to make so much difference in school, having a Vice you can really work with. She is going to change her boarding-house, and I have already persuaded her to get that velvet hat, and have not yet given up hope of persuading her to sing in the choir.
Mr Hamilton’s dog came down yesterday and chivied Dusty Miller. ‘This is the last straw,’ said Rebecca Dew, and with her red cheeks redder still, her chubby back shaking with anger and in such a hurry that she put her hat on hindside before, and never knew it, she toddled up the road and gave Mr Hamilton quite a large piece of her mind. I can just see his foolish, amiable face while he was listening to her.
‘I do not like That Cat,’ she told me, ‘but he is ours, and no Hamilton dog is going to come here and give him impudence in his own backyard. “He only chased your cat in fun,” said Jabez Hamilton. “The Hamilton ideas of fun are different from the MacComber ideas of fun or the MacLean ideas of fun – or, if it comes to that, the Dew ideas of fun,” I told him. “Tut, tut! You must have had cabbage for dinner, Miss Dew,” said he. “No,” I said, “but I could have had. Mrs Captain MacComber didn’t sell all her cabbages last fall and leave her family without any because the price was so good. There are some people,” sez I, “that can’t hear anything because of the jingle in their pocket.” And I left that to sink in. But what could you expect from a Hamilton? Low scum!’
There is a crimson star hanging low