Chapter XX - Page 2

care as much as ever. There's such a lot of different Annes in me.
I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person.
If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more
comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."

One June evening, when the orchards were pink blossomed again,
when the frogs were singing silverly sweet in the marshes about
the head of the Lake of Shining Waters, and the air was full of
the savor of clover fields and balsamic fir woods, Anne was
sitting by her gable window. She had been studying her lessons,
but it had grown too dark to see the book, so she had fallen into
wide-eyed reverie, looking out past the boughs of the Snow Queen,
once more bestarred with its tufts of blossom.

In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged.
The walls were as white, the pincushion as hard, the chairs as
stiffly and yellowly upright as ever. Yet the whole character of
the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing
personality that seemed to pervade it and to be quite independent
of schoolgirl books and dresses and ribbons, and even of the
cracked blue jug full of apple blossoms on the table. It was as
if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had
taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the
bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine.
Presently Marilla came briskly in with some of Anne's freshly
ironed school aprons. She hung them over a chair and sat down
with a short sigh. She had had one of her headaches that
afternoon, and although the pain had gone she felt weak and
"tuckered out," as she expressed it. Anne looked at her with
eyes limpid with sympathy.

"I do truly wish I could have had the headache in your place,
Marilla. I would have endured it joyfully for your sake."

"I guess you did your part in attending to the work and letting
me rest," said Marilla. "You seem to have got on fairly well and
made fewer mistakes than usual. Of course it wasn't exactly
necessary to starch Matthew's handkerchiefs! And most people when
they put a pie in the oven to warm up for dinner take it out and
eat it when it gets hot instead of leaving it to be burned to a
crisp. But that doesn't seem to be your way evidently."

Headaches always left Marilla somewhat sarcastic.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Anne penitently. "I never thought about
that pie from the moment I put it in the oven till now, although
I felt INSTINCTIVELY that there was something missing on the
dinner table. I was firmly resolved, when you left me in charge
this morning, not to imagine anything, but keep my thoughts on
facts. I did pretty well until I put the pie in, and then an