“I think it would,” agreed Anne solemnly. “Anyway, I daresay that if your Grandma and I both got down to what we really do mean, under our different ways of expressing it, we’d find out we both meant much the same thing. You’d better go by her way of expressing it, since it’s been the result of experience. We’ll have to wait until we see how the twins do turn out before we can be sure that my way is equally good.”
After lunch they went back to the garden, where Paul made the acquaintance of the echoes, to his wonder and delight, while Anne and Miss Lavendar sat on the stone bench under the poplar and talked.
“So you are going away in the fall?” said Miss Lavendar wistfully. “I ought to be glad for your sake, Anne … but I’m horribly, selfishly sorry. I shall miss you so much. Oh, sometimes, I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.”
“That sounds like something Miss Eliza Andrews might say but never Miss Lavendar,” said Anne. “Nothing is worse than emptiness … and I’m not going out of your life. There are such things as letters and vacations. Dearest, I’m afraid you’re looking a little pale and tired.”
“Oh … hoo … hoo … hoo,” went Paul on the dyke, where he had been making noises diligently … not all of them melodious in the making, but all coming back transmuted into the very gold and silver of sound by the fairy alchemists over the river. Miss Lavendar made an impatient movement with her pretty hands.
“I’m just tired of everything … even of the echoes. There is nothing in my life but echoes … echoes of lost hopes and dreams and joys. They’re beautiful and mocking. Oh Anne, it’s horrid of me to talk like this when I have company. It’s just that I’m getting old and it doesn’t agree with me. I know I’ll be fearfully cranky by the time I’m sixty. But perhaps all I need is a course of blue pills.”
At this moment Charlotta the Fourth, who had disappeared after lunch, returned, and announced that the northeast corner of Mr. John Kimball’s pasture was red with early strawberries, and wouldn’t Miss Shirley like to go and pick some.
“Early strawberries for tea!” exclaimed Miss Lavendar. “Oh, I’m not so old as I thought … and I don’t need a single blue pill! Girls, when you come back with your strawberries we’ll have tea out here under the silver poplar. I’ll have it all ready for you with homegrown cream.”
Anne and Charlotta the Fourth accordingly betook themselves back to Mr. Kimball’s pasture, a green remote place where the air was as soft as velvet and fragrant as a bed of violets and golden as amber.
“Oh, isn’t it sweet and fresh back here?” breathed Anne. “I just feel as if I were drinking in the sunshine.”
“Yes, ma’am, so do I. That’s just exactly how I feel too, ma’am,” agreed Charlotta the Fourth, who would have said precisely the same thing if Anne had remarked that she felt like a pelican of the wilderness. Always after Anne had visited Echo Lodge Charlotta the Fourth mounted to her little room over the kitchen and tried before her looking-glass to speak and look and move like Anne. Charlotta could never flatter herself that she quite succeeded; but practice makes perfect, as Charlotta had learned at school, and she fondly hoped that in time she might catch the trick of that dainty uplift of chin, that quick, starry outflashing of eyes, that fashion of walking as if you were a bough swaying in the wind. It seemed so easy when you watched Anne. Charlotta the Fourth admired Anne wholeheartedly. It was not that she thought her so very handsome. Diana Barry’s beauty of crimson cheek and black curls was much more to Charlotta the Fourth’s taste than Anne’s moonshine charm of luminous gray eyes and the pale, ever-changing roses of her cheeks.
“But I’d rather look like you than be pretty,” she told Anne sincerely.
Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed. Public opinion never agreed on Anne’s looks. People who had heard her called handsome met her and were disappointed. People who had heard her called plain saw her and wondered where other people’s eyes were. Anne herself would never believe that she had any claim to beauty. When she looked in the glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the nose thereof. Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive, ever-varying play of feeling that came and went over her features like a rosy illuminating flame, or the charm of dream and laughter alternating in her big eyes.
While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities. Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her … the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen.
As they picked, Charlotta the Fourth confided to Anne her fears regarding Miss Lavendar. The warmhearted little handmaiden was honestly worried over her adored mistress’ condition.
“Miss Lavendar isn’t well, Miss Shirley, ma’am. I’m sure
