Chapter XXXV

CHAPTER XXXV

The Winter at Queen's

Anne's homesickness wore off, greatly helped in the wearing
by her weekend visits home. As long as the open weather lasted
the Avonlea students went out to Carmody on the new branch
railway every Friday night. Diana and several other Avonlea
young folks were generally on hand to meet them and they all
walked over to Avonlea in a merry party. Anne thought those
Friday evening gypsyings over the autumnal hills in the crisp
golden air, with the homelights of Avonlea twinkling beyond,
were the best and dearest hours in the whole week.

Gilbert Blythe nearly always walked with Ruby Gillis and carried
her satchel for her. Ruby was a very handsome young lady,
now thinking herself quite as grown up as she really was;
she wore her skirts as long as her mother would let her and
did her hair up in town, though she had to take it down
when she went home. She had large, bright-blue eyes, a
brilliant complexion, and a plump showy figure. She laughed
a great deal, was cheerful and good-tempered, and enjoyed the
pleasant things of life frankly.

"But I shouldn't think she was the sort of girl Gilbert would like,"
whispered Jane to Anne. Anne did not think so either, but she would
not have said so for the Avery scholarship. She could not help
thinking, too, that it would be very pleasant to have such a friend
as Gilbert to jest and chatter with and exchange ideas about books
and studies and ambitions. Gilbert had ambitions, she knew, and
Ruby Gillis did not seem the sort of person with whom such could
be profitably discussed.

There was no silly sentiment in Anne's ideas concerning Gilbert.
Boys were to her, when she thought about them at all, merely
possible good comrades. If she and Gilbert had been friends
she would not have cared how many other friends he had
nor with whom he walked. She had a genius for friendship;
girl friends she had in plenty; but she had a vague consciousness
that masculine friendship might also be a good thing to round
out one's conceptions of companionship and furnish broader
standpoints of judgment and comparison. Not that Anne could
have put her feelings on the matter into just such clear definition.
But she thought that if Gilbert had ever walked home with her
from the train, over the crisp fields and along the ferny byways,
they might have had many and merry and interesting conversations
about the new world that was opening around them and their hopes
and ambitions therein. Gilbert was a clever young fellow, with
his own thoughts about things and a determination to get the best
out of life and put the best into it. Ruby Gillis told Jane Andrews
that she didn't understand half the things Gilbert Blythe said;