“Changes ain’t totally pleasant but they’re excellent things,” said Mr. Harrison philosophically. “Two years is about long enough for things to stay exactly the same. If they stayed put any longer they might grow mossy.”
Mr. Harrison was smoking on his veranda. His wife had self-sacrificingly told him that he might smoke in the house if he took care to sit by an open window. Mr. Harrison rewarded this concession by going outdoors altogether to smoke in fine weather, and so mutual goodwill reigned.
Anne had come over to ask Mrs. Harrison for some of her yellow dahlias. She and Diana were going through to Echo Lodge that evening to help Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth with their final preparations for the morrow’s bridal. Miss Lavendar herself never had dahlias; she did not like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her old-fashioned garden. But flowers of any kind were rather scarce in Avonlea and the neighbouring districts that summer, thanks to Uncle Abe’s storm; and Anne and Diana thought that a certain old cream-coloured stone jug, usually kept sacred to doughnuts, brimmed over with yellow dahlias, would be just the thing to set in a dim angle of the stone house stairs, against the dark background of red hall paper.
“I s’pose you’ll be starting off for college in a fortnight’s time?” continued Mr. Harrison. “Well, we’re going to miss you an awful lot, Emily and me. To be sure, Mrs. Lynde’ll be over there in your place. There ain’t nobody but a substitute can be found for them.”
The irony of Mr. Harrison’s tone is quite untransferable to paper. In spite of his wife’s intimacy with Mrs. Lynde, the best that could be said of the relationship between her and Mr. Harrison, even under the new regime, was that they preserved an armed neutrality.
“Yes, I’m going,” said Anne. “I’m very glad with my head … and very sorry with my heart.”
“I s’pose you’ll be scooping up all the honours that are lying round loose at Redmond.”
“I may try for one or two of them,” confessed Anne, “but I don’t care so much for things like that as I did two years ago. What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.”
Mr. Harrison nodded.
“That’s the idea exactly. That’s what college ought to be for, instead of for turning out a lot of B.A.s, so chock full of book-learning and vanity that there ain’t room for anything else. You’re all right. College won’t be able to do you much harm, I reckon.”
Diana and Anne drove over to Echo Lodge after tea, taking with them all the flowery spoil that several predatory expeditions in their own and their neighbours’ gardens had yielded. They found the stone house agog with excitement. Charlotta the Fourth was flying around with such vim and briskness that her blue bows seemed really to possess the power of being everywhere at once. Like the helmet of Navarre, Charlotta’s blue bows waved ever in the thickest of the fray.
“Praise be to goodness you’ve come,” she said devoutly, “for there’s heaps of things to do … and the frosting on that cake won’t harden … and there’s all the silver to be rubbed up yet … and the horsehair trunk to be packed … and the roosters for the chicken salad are running out there beyant the henhouse yet, crowing, Miss Shirley, ma’am. And Miss Lavendar ain’t to be trusted to do a thing. I was thankful when Mr. Irving came a few minutes ago and took her off for a walk in the woods. Courting’s all right in its place, Miss Shirley, ma’am, but if you try to mix it up with cooking and scouring everything’s spoiled. That’s my opinion, Miss Shirley, ma’am.”
Anne and Diana worked so heartily that by ten o’clock even Charlotta the Fourth was satisfied. She braided her hair in innumerable plaits and took her weary little bones off to bed.
“But I’m sure I shan’t sleep a blessed wink, Miss Shirley, ma’am, for fear that something’ll go wrong at the last minute … the cream won’t whip … or Mr. Irving’ll have a stroke and not be able to come.”
“He isn’t in the habit of having strokes, is he?” asked Diana, the dimpled corners of her mouth twitching. To Diana, Charlotta the Fourth was, if not exactly a thing of beauty, certainly a joy forever.
“They’re not things that go by habit,” said Charlotta the Fourth with dignity. “They just happen … and there you are. Anybody can have a stroke. You don’t have to learn how. Mr. Irving looks a lot like an uncle of mine that had one once just as he was sitting down to dinner one day. But maybe everything’ll go all right. In this world you’ve just got to hope for the best and prepare for the worst and take whatever God sends.”
“The only thing I’m worried about is that it won’t be fine tomorrow,” said Diana. “Uncle Abe predicted rain for the middle of the week, and ever since the big storm I can’t help believing there’s a good deal in what Uncle Abe says.”
Anne, who knew better than Diana just how much Uncle Abe had to do with the storm, was not much disturbed by this. She slept the sleep of the just and weary, and was roused at an unearthly hour
