“I hope I shall make new friends,” said Anne thoughtfully. “The possibilities of making new friends help to make life very fascinating. But no matter how many friends I make they’ll never be as dear to me as the old ones … especially a certain girl with black eyes and dimples. Can you guess who she is, Diana?”
“But there’ll be so many clever girls at Redmond,” sighed Diana, “and I’m only a stupid little country girl who says ‘I seen’ sometimes… though I really know better when I stop to think. Well, of course these past two years have really been too pleasant to last. I know SOMEBODY who is glad you are going to Redmond anyhow. Anne, I’m going to ask you a question … a serious question. Don’t be vexed and do answer seriously. Do you care anything for Gilbert?”
“Ever so much as a friend and not a bit in the way you mean,” said Anne calmly and decidedly; she also thought she was speaking sincerely.
Diana sighed. She wished, somehow, that Anne had answered differently.
“Don’t you mean EVER to be married, Anne?”
“Perhaps … some day … when I meet the right one,” said Anne, smiling dreamily up at the moonlight.
“But how can you be sure when you do meet the right one?” persisted Diana.
“Oh, I should know him … SOMETHING would tell me. You know what my ideal is, Diana.”
“But people’s ideals change sometimes.”
“Mine won’t. And I COULDN’T care for any man who didn’t fulfill it.”
“What if you never meet him?”
“Then I shall die an old maid,” was the cheerful response. “I daresay it isn’t the hardest death by any means.”
“Oh, I suppose the dying would be easy enough; it’s the living an old maid I shouldn’t like,” said Diana, with no intention of being humorous. “Although I wouldn’t mind being an old maid VERY much if I could be one like Miss Lavendar. But I never could be. When I’m forty-five I’ll be horribly fat. And while there might be some romance about a thin old maid there couldn’t possibly be any about a fat one. Oh, mind you, Nelson Atkins proposed to Ruby Gillis three weeks ago. Ruby told me all about it. She says she never had any intention of taking him, because any one who married him will have to go in with the old folks; but Ruby says that he made such a perfectly beautiful and romantic proposal that it simply swept her off her feet. But she didn’t want to do anything rash so she asked for a week to consider; and two days later she was at a meeting of the Sewing Circle at his mother’s and there was a book called ‘The Complete Guide to Etiquette,’ lying on the parlor table. Ruby said she simply couldn’t describe her feelings when in a section of it headed, ‘The Deportment of Courtship and Marriage,’ she found the very proposal Nelson had made, word for word. She went home and wrote him a perfectly scathing refusal; and she says his father and mother have taken turns watching him ever since for fear he’ll drown himself in the river; but Ruby says they needn’t be afraid; for in the Deportment of Courtship and Marriage it told how a rejected lover should behave and there’s nothing about drowning in THAT. And she says Wilbur Blair is literally pining away for her but she’s perfectly helpless in the matter.”
Anne made an impatient movement.
“I hate to say it … it seems so disloyal … but, well, I don’t like Ruby Gillis now. I liked her when we went to school and Queen’s together … though not so well as you and Jane of course. But this last year at Carmody she seems so different … so … so …”
“I know,” nodded Diana. “It’s the Gillis coming out in her … she can’t help it. Mrs. Lynde says that if ever a Gillis girl thought about anything but the boys she never showed it in her walk and conversation. She talks about nothing but boys and what compliments they pay her, and how crazy they all are about her at Carmody. And the strange thing is, they ARE, too …” Diana admitted this somewhat resentfully. “Last night when I saw her in Mr. Blair’s store she whispered to me that she’d just made a new ‘mash.’ I wouldn’t ask her who it was, because I knew she was dying to BE asked. Well, it’s what Ruby always wanted, I suppose. You remember even when she was little she always said she meant to have dozens of beaus when she grew up and have the very gayest time she could before she settled down. She’s so different from Jane, isn’t she? Jane is such a nice, sensible, ladylike girl.”
“Dear old Jane is a jewel,” agreed Anne, “but,” she added, leaning forward to bestow a tender pat on the plump, dimpled little hand hanging over her pillow, “there’s nobody like my own Diana after all. Do you remember that evening we first met, Diana, and ‘swore’ eternal friendship in your garden? We’ve kept that ‘oath,’ I think … we’ve never had a quarrel nor even a coolness. I shall never forget the thrill that went over me the day you told me you loved me. I had had such a lonely, starved heart all through my childhood. I’m just beginning to realize how starved and lonely it really was. Nobody cared anything for me or wanted to be bothered with me. I should have been miserable if it hadn’t been for that strange little dream-life of mine, wherein I imagined all the friends and love I craved. But when I came to Green Gables everything was changed. And then I met you. You don’t know what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the warm and true affection you’ve always given me.”
“And always, always will,” sobbed Diana. “I shall NEVER love anybody … any GIRL … half as well as I love you. And if I ever do marry and have a little girl of my own I’m going to name her ANNE.”
XXVII. An Afternoon at the Stone House
“Where are you going, all dressed up, Anne?” Davy wanted to know. “You look bully in that dress.”
Anne had come down to dinner in a new dress of pale green muslin … the first color she had worn since Matthew’s death. It became her perfectly, bringing out all the delicate, flowerlike tints of her face and the gloss and burnish of her hair.
“Davy, how many times have I told you that you mustn’t use that word,” she rebuked. “I’m going to Echo Lodge.”
“Take me with you,” entreated Davy.
“I would if I were driving. But I’m going to walk and it’s too far for your eight-year-old legs. Besides, Paul is going with me and I fear you don’t enjoy yourself in his company.”
“Oh, I like Paul lots better’n I did,” said Davy, beginning to make fearful inroads into his pudding. “Since I’ve got pretty good myself I don’t mind his being gooder so much. If I can keep on I’ll catch up with him some day, both in legs and goodness. ‘Sides, Paul’s real nice to us second primer boys in school. He won’t let the other big boys meddle with us and he shows us lots of games.”
“How came Paul to fall into the brook at noon hour yesterday?” asked Anne. “I met him on the playground, such a dripping figure that I sent him promptly home for clothes without waiting to find out what had happened.”
“Well, it was partly a zacksident,” explained Davy. “He stuck his head in on purpose but the rest of him fell in zacksidentally. We was all down at the brook and Prillie Rogerson got mad at Paul about something … she’s awful mean and horrid anyway, if she IS pretty … and said that his grandmother put his hair up in curl rags every night. Paul wouldn’t have minded what she said, I guess, but Gracie Andrews laughed, and Paul got awful red, ‘cause Gracie’s his girl, you know. He’s CLEAN GONE on her … brings her flowers and carries her books as far as the shore road. He got as red as a beet and said his grandmother didn’t do any such thing and his hair was born curly. And then he laid down on the bank and stuck