to do if it had been lacking.
I wouldn t feel comfortable without it, she thought. Gilbert looks
awfully determined. I suppose he s making up his mind, here and now, to
win the medal. What a splendid chin he has! I never noticed it before.
I do wish Jane and Ruby had gone in for First Class, too. I suppose I
won t feel so much like a cat in a strange garret when I get acquainted,
though. I wonder which of the girls here are going to be my friends.
It s really an interesting speculation. Of course I promised Diana that
no Queen s girl, no matter how much I liked her, should ever be as dear
to me as she is; but I ve lots of second-best affections to bestow. I
like the look of that girl with the brown eyes and the crimson waist.
She looks vivid and red-rosy; there s that pale, fair one gazing out of
the window. She has lovely hair, and looks as if she knew a thing or two
about dreams. I d like to know them both--know them well--well enough to
walk with my arm about their waists, and call them nicknames. But just
now I don t know them and they don t know me, and probably don t want to
know me particularly. Oh, it s lonesome!
It was lonesomer still when Anne found herself alone in her hall bedroom
that night at twilight. She was not to board with the other girls, who
all had relatives in town to take pity on them. Miss Josephine Barry
would have liked to board her, but Beechwood was so far from the
Academy that it was out of the question; so Miss Barry hunted up a
boarding-house, assuring Matthew and Marilla that it was the very place
for Anne.
The lady who keeps it is a reduced gentlewoman, explained Miss Barry.
Her husband was a British officer, and she is very careful what sort
of boarders she takes. Anne will not meet with any objectionable persons
under her roof. The table is good, and the house is near the Academy, in
a quiet neighborhood.
All this might be quite true, and indeed, proved to be so, but it did
not materially help Anne in the first agony of homesickness that seized
upon her. She looked dismally about her narrow little room, with its
dull-papered, pictureless walls, its small iron bedstead and empty
bookcase; and a horrible choke came into her throat as she thought of
her own white room at Green Gables, where she would have the pleasant
consciousness of a great green still outdoors, of sweet peas growing in
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