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 irresistible temptation came to me to
imagine I was an enchanted princess shut up in a lonely tower with a
handsome knight riding to my rescue on a coal-black steed. So that
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