her brilliancy won admiration. Nor did she monopolize
the conversation. She could draw others out as
skillfully and fully as she could talk herself, and
Anne and Diana found themselves chattering freely
to her. Mrs. Pendexter said little; she merely
smiled with her lovely eyes and lips, and ate chicken
and fruit cake and preserves with such exquisite grace
that she conveyed the impression of dining on ambrosia
and honeydew. But then, as Anne said to Diana
later on, anybody so divinely beautiful as Mrs. Pendexter
didn’t need to talk; it was enough for her just
to look.
After dinner they all had a walk through Lover’s
Lane and Violet Vale and the Birch Path, then back
through the Haunted Wood to the Dryad’s Bubble,
where they sat down and talked for a delightful last
half hour. Mrs. Morgan wanted to know how the
Haunted Wood came by its name, and laughed until she
cried when she heard the story and Anne’s dramatic
account of a certain memorable walk through it at the
witching hour of twilight.
“It has indeed been a feast of reason and flow
of soul, hasn’t it?” said Anne, when her
guests had gone and she and Diana were alone again.
“I don’t know which I enjoyed more . .
. listening to Mrs. Morgan or gazing at Mrs. Pendexter.
I believe we had a nicer time than if we’d known
they were coming and been cumbered with much serving.
You must stay to tea with me, Diana, and we’ll
talk it all over.”
“Priscilla says Mrs. Pendexter’s husband’s
sister is married to an English earl; and yet she
took a second helping of the plum preserves,”
said Diana, as if the two facts were somehow incompatible.
“I daresay even the English earl himself wouldn’t
have turned up his aristocratic nose at Marilla’s
plum preserves,” said Anne proudly.
Anne did not mention the misfortune which had befallen
her nose when she related the day’s history
to Marilla that evening. But she took the bottle
of freckle lotion and emptied it out of the window.
“I shall never try any beautifying messes again,”
she said, darkly resolute. “They may do
for careful, deliberate people; but for anyone so
hopelessly given over to making mistakes as I seem
to be it’s tempting fate to meddle with them.”
Sweet Miss Lavendar
School opened and Anne returned to her work, with
fewer theories but considerably more experience.
She had several new pupils, six- and seven-year-olds
just venturing, round-eyed, into a world of wonder.
Among them were Davy and Dora. Davy sat with Milty
Boulter, who had been going to school for a year and
was therefore quite a man of the world. Dora
had made a compact at Sunday School the previous Sunday
to sit with Lily Sloane; but Lily Sloane not coming
the first day, she was temporarily assigned to Mirabel
Cotton, who was ten years old and therefore, in Dora’s
eyes, one of the “big girls.”
