Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [96]
Anne joyfully agreed, and next day Leslie was installed as an inmate of the little house of dreams. Miss Cornelia warmly approved of the arrangement.
‘It seems providential,’ she told Anne in confidence. ‘I’m sorry for Matilda Clow, but since she had to break her leg it couldn’t have happened at a better time. Leslie will be here while Owen Ford is in Four Winds, and those old cats up at the Glen won’t get the chance to meow, as they would if she was living over there alone and Owen going to see her. They are doing enough of it as it is, because she doesn’t put on mourning. I said to one of them, “If you mean she should put on mourning for George Moore, it seems to me more like his resurrection than his funeral; and if it’s Dick you mean, I confess I can’t see the propriety of going into weeds for a man who died thirteen years ago and good riddance then!” And when old Louisa Baldwin remarked to me that she thought it very strange that Leslie should never have suspected it wasn’t her own husband I said, “You never suspected it wasn’t Dick Moore, and you were next-door neighbour to him all his life, and by nature you’re ten times as suspicious as Leslie.” But you can’t stop some people’s tongues, Anne, dearie, and I’m real thankful Leslie will be under your roof while Owen is courting her.’
Owen Ford came to the little house one August evening when Leslie and Anne were absorbed in worshipping the baby. He paused at the open door of the living-room, unseen by the two within, gazing with greedy eyes at the beautiful picture. Leslie sat on the floor with the baby in her lap, making ecstatic dabs at his fat little hands as he fluttered them in the air.
‘Oh, you dear, beautiful, beloved baby,’ she mumbled, catching one wee hand and covering it with kisses.
‘Isn’t him ze darlingest itty sing,’ crooned Anne, hanging over the arm of her chair adoringly. ‘Dem itty wee pads are ze very tweetest handies in ze whole big world, isn’t dey, you darling itty man.’
Anne, in the months before Little Jem’s coming, had pored diligently over several wise volumes, and pinned her faith to one in especial, Sir Oracle on the Care and Training of Children. Sir Oracle implored parents by all they held sacred never to talk ‘baby talk’ to their children. Infants should invariably be addressed in classical language from the moment of their birth. So should they learn to speak English undefiled from their earliest utterance. ‘How,’ demanded Sir Oracle, ‘can a mother reasonably expect her child to learn correct speech, when she continually accustoms its impressionable grey matter to such absurd expressions and distortions of our noble tongue as thoughtless mothers inflict every day on the helpless creatures committed to their care? Can a child who is constantly called “tweet itty wee singie” ever attain to any proper conception of his own being and possibilities and destiny?’
Anne was vastly impressed with this, and informed Gilbert that she meant to make it an inflexible rule never, under any circumstances, to talk ‘baby talk’ to her children. Gilbert agreed with her, and they made a solemn compact on the subject – a compact which Anne shamelessly violated the very first moment Little Jem was laid in her arms. ‘Oh, the darling itty wee sing!’ she had exclaimed. And she had continued to violate it ever since. When Gilbert teased her she laughed Sir Oracle to scorn.
‘He never had any children of his own, Gilbert – I am positive he hadn’t or he would never have written such rubbish. You just can’t help talking baby talk to a baby. It comes natural – and it’s right. It would be inhuman to talk to those tiny, soft, velvety little creatures as we do to great big boys and girls. Babies want love and cuddling and all the sweet baby talk they can get, and