sunshine and lazy shadows of the August evening.
No, Marilla, but oh, what do you think? I am invited to tea at the
manse tomorrow afternoon! Mrs. Allan left the letter for me at the post
office. Just look at it, Marilla. Miss Anne Shirley, Green Gables.
That is the first time I was ever called Miss. Such a thrill as it
gave me! I shall cherish it forever among my choicest treasures.
Mrs. Allan told me she meant to have all the members of her
Sunday-school class to tea in turn, said Marilla, regarding the
wonderful event very coolly. You needn t get in such a fever over it.
Do learn to take things calmly, child.
For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All
spirit and fire and dew, as she was, the pleasures and pains of life
came to her with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely
troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would
probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently
understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more
than compensate. Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill
Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien
to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows. She did not
make much headway, as she sorrowfully admitted to herself. The downfall
of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into deeps of affliction. The
fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. Marilla had
almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into
her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither
would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she
was.
Anne went to bed that night speechless with misery because Matthew had
said the wind was round northeast and he feared it would be a rainy day
tomorrow. The rustle of the poplar leaves about the house worried her,
it sounded so like pattering raindrops, and the full, faraway roar of
the gulf, to which she listened delightedly at other times, loving its
strange, sonorous, haunting rhythm, now seemed like a prophecy of storm
and disaster to a small maiden who particularly wanted a fine day. Anne
thought that the morning would never come.
But all things have an end, even nights before the day on which you are
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