No, I don t want any of your imaginings. Just you stick to bald facts.
Begin at the beginning. Where were you born and how old are you?
I was eleven last March, said Anne, resigning herself to bald facts
with a little sigh. And I was born in Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia.
My father s name was Walter Shirley, and he was a teacher in the
Bolingbroke High School. My mother s name was Bertha Shirley. Aren t
Walter and Bertha lovely names? I m so glad my parents had nice names.
It would be a real disgrace to have a father named--well, say Jedediah,
wouldn t it?
I guess it doesn t matter what a person s name is as long as he behaves
himself, said Marilla, feeling herself called upon to inculcate a good
and useful moral.
Well, I don t know. Anne looked thoughtful. I read in a book once
that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I ve never
been able to believe it. I don t believe a rose _would_ be as nice if
it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage. I suppose my father could
have been a good man even if he had been called Jedediah; but I m sure
it would have been a cross. Well, my mother was a teacher in the High
School, too, but when she married father she gave up teaching, of
course. A husband was enough responsibility. Mrs. Thomas said that they
were a pair of babies and as poor as church mice. They went to live in
a weeny-teeny little yellow house in Bolingbroke. I ve never seen that
house, but I ve imagined it thousands of times. I think it must have
had honeysuckle over the parlor window and lilacs in the front yard and
lilies of the valley just inside the gate. Yes, and muslin curtains in
all the windows. Muslin curtains give a house such an air. I was born
in that house. Mrs. Thomas said I was the homeliest baby she ever saw,
I was so scrawny and tiny and nothing but eyes, but that mother thought
I was perfectly beautiful. I should think a mother would be a better
judge than a poor woman who came in to scrub, wouldn t you? I m glad
she was satisfied with me anyhow; I would feel so sad if I thought I
was a disappointment to her--because she didn t live very long after
that, you see. She died of fever when I was just three months old. I
do wish she d lived long enough for me to remember calling her mother.
I think it would be so sweet to say mother, don t you? And father
died four days afterwards from fever too. That left me an orphan and
folks were at their wits end, so Mrs. Thomas said, what to do with
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