“Let me read some of your stories.”
“Well, here’s my masterpiece. Note its cheerful title—’My Graves.’ I shed quarts of tears while writing it, and the other girls shed gallons while I read it. Jane Andrews’ mother scolded her frightfully because she had so many handkerchiefs in the wash that week. It’s a harrowing tale of the wanderings of a Methodist minister’s wife. I made her a Methodist because it was necessary that she should wander. She buried a child every place she lived in. There were nine of them and their graves were severed far apart, ranging from Newfoundland to Vancouver. I described the children, pictured their several death beds, and detailed their tombstones and epitaphs. I had intended to bury the whole nine but when I had disposed of eight my invention of horrors gave out and I permitted the ninth to live as a hopeless cripple.”
While Stella read My Graves, punctuating its tragic paragraphs with chuckles, and Rusty slept the sleep of a just cat who has been out all night curled up on a Jane Andrews tale of a beautiful maiden of fifteen who went to nurse in a leper colony — of course dying of the loathsome disease finally — Anne glanced over the other manuscripts and recalled the old days at Avonlea school when the members of the Story Club, sitting under the spruce trees or down among the ferns by the brook, had written them. What fun they had had! How the sunshine and mirth of those olden summers returned as she read. Not all the glory that was Greece or the grandeur that was Rome could weave such wizardry as those funny, tearful tales of the Story Club. Among the manuscripts Anne found one written on sheets of wrapping paper. A wave of laughter filled her gray eyes as she recalled the time and place of its genesis. It was the sketch she had written the day she fell through the roof of the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road.
Anne glanced over it, then fell to reading it intently. It was a little dialogue between asters and sweetpeas, wild canaries in the lilac bush, and the guardian spirit of the garden. After she had read it, she sat, staring into space; and when Stella had gone she smoothed out the crumpled manuscript.
“I believe I will,” she said resolutely.
Chapter XXXVI.
The Gardners’Call
“Here is a letter with an Indian stamp for you, Aunt Jimsie,” said Phil. “Here are three for Stella, and two for Pris, and a glorious fat one for me from Jo. There’s nothing for you, Anne, except a circular.”
Nobody noticed Anne’s flush as she took the thin letter Phil tossed her carelessly. But a few minutes later Phil looked up to see a transfigured Anne.
“Honey, what good thing has happened?”
“The Youth’s Friend has accepted a little sketch I sent them a fortnight ago,” said Anne, trying hard to speak as if she were accustomed to having sketches accepted every mail, but not quite succeeding.
“Anne Shirley! How glorious! What was it? When is it to be published? Did they pay you for it?”
“Yes; they’ve sent a check for ten dollars, and the editor writes that he would like to see more of my work. Dear man, he shall. It was an old sketch I found in my box. I rewrote it and sent it in — but I never really thought it could be accepted because it had no plot,” said Anne, recalling the bitter experience of Averil’s Atonement.
“What are you going to do with that ten dollars, Anne? Let’s all go up town and get drunk,” suggested Phil.
“I AM going to squander it in a wild soulless revel of some sort,” declared Anne gaily. “At all events it isn’t tainted money — like the check I got for that horrible Reliable Baking Powder story. I spent IT usefully for clothes and hated them every time I put them on.”
“Think of having a real live author at Patty’s Place,” said Priscilla.
“It’s a great responsibility,” said Aunt Jamesina solemnly.
“Indeed it is,” agreed Pris with equal solemnity. “Authors are kittle cattle. You never know when or how they will break out. Anne may make copy of us.”
“I meant that the ability to write for the Press was a great responsibility,” said Aunt Jamesina severely, “and I hope Anne realizes, it. My daughter used to write stories before she went to the foreign field, but now she has turned her attention to higher things. She used to say her motto was ‘Never write a line you would be ashamed to read at your own funeral.’ You’d better take that for yours, Anne, if you are going to embark in literature. Though, to be sure,” added Aunt Jamesina perplexedly, “Elizabeth always used to laugh when she said it. She always laughed so much that I don’t know how she ever came to decide on being a missionary. I’m thankful she did — I prayed that she might — but — I wish she hadn’t.”
Then Aunt Jamesina wondered why those giddy girls all laughed.
Anne’s eyes shone all that day; literary ambitions sprouted and budded in her brain; their exhilaration accompanied her to Jennie Cooper’s walking party, and not even the sight of Gilbert and Christine, walking just ahead of her and Roy, could quite subdue the sparkle of her starry hopes. Nevertheless, she was not so rapt from things of earth as to be unable to notice that Christine’s walk was decidedly ungraceful.
“But I suppose Gilbert looks only at her face. So like a man,” thought Anne scornfully.
“Shall you be home Saturday afternoon?” asked Roy.
“Yes.”
“My mother and sisters are coming to call on you,” said Roy quietly.
Something went over Anne which might be described as a thrill, but it was hardly a pleasant one. She had never met any of Roy’s family; she realized the significance of his statement; and it had, somehow, an irrevocableness about it that chilled her.
“I shall be glad to see them,” she said flatly; and then wondered if she really would be glad. She ought to be, of course. But would it not be something of an ordeal? Gossip had filtered to Anne regarding the light in which the Gardners viewed the “infatuation” of son and brother. Roy must have brought pressure to bear in the matter of this call. Anne knew she would be weighed in the balance. From the fact that they had consented to call she understood that, willingly or unwillingly, they regarded her as a possible member of their clan.
“I shall just be myself. I shall not TRY to make a good impression,” thought Anne loftily. But she was wondering what dress she would better wear Saturday afternoon, and if the new style of high hairdressing would suit her better than the old; and the walking party was rather spoiled for her. By night she had decided that she would wear her brown chiffon on Saturday, but would do her hair low.
Friday afternoon none of the girls had classes at Redmond. Stella took the opportunity to write a paper for the Philomathic Society, and was sitting at the table in the corner of the livingroom with an untidy litter of notes and manuscript on the floor around her. Stella always vowed she never could write anything unless she threw each sheet down as she completed it. Anne, in her flannel blouse and serge skirt, with her hair rather blown from her windy walk home, was sitting squarely in the middle of the floor, teasing the Sarah-cat with a wishbone. Joseph and Rusty were both curled up in her lap. A warm plummy odor filled the whole house, for Priscilla was cooking in the kitchen. Presently she came in, enshrouded in a huge work-apron, with a smudge of flour on her nose, to show Aunt Jamesina the chocolate cake she had just iced.
At this auspicious moment the knocker sounded. Nobody paid any attention to it save Phil, who sprang up and opened it, expecting a boy with the hat she had bought that morning. On the doorstep stood Mrs. Gardner and her daughters.
Anne scrambled to her feet somehow, emptying