Mrs. Morgan must be an authority on girls when she has written so much about them, and I do want her to have a good opinion of us.  I’ve imagined it all out a dozen different ways . . . what she’ll look like, and what she’ll say, and what I’ll say.  And I’m so anxious about my nose.  There are seven freckles on it, as you can see.  They came at the A.V.I S. picnic, when I went around in the sun without my hat.  I suppose it’s ungrateful of me to worry over them, when I should be thankful they’re not spread all over my face as they once were; but I do wish they hadn’t come . . . all Mrs. Morgan’s heroines have such perfect complexions.  I can’t recall a freckled one among them.”

“Yours are not very noticeable,” comforted Diana.  “Try a little lemon juice on them tonight.”

The next day Anne made her pies and lady fingers, did up her muslin dress, and swept and dusted every room in the house . . . a quite unnecessary proceeding, for Green Gables was, as usual, in the apple pie order dear to Marilla’s heart.  But Anne felt that a fleck of dust would be a desecration in a house that was to be honored by a visit from Charlotte E. Morgan.  She even cleaned out the “catch-all” closet under the stairs, although there was not the remotest possibility of Mrs. Morgan’s seeing its interior.

“But I want to feel that it is in perfect order, even if she isn’t to see it,” Anne told Marilla.  “You know, in her book ‘Golden Keys,’ she makes her two heroines Alice and Louisa take for their motto that verse of Longfellow’s,

     ’In the elder days of art
     Builders wrought with greatest care
     Each minute and unseen part,
     For the gods see everywhere,’

and so they always kept their cellar stairs scrubbed and never forgot to sweep under the beds.  I should have a guilty conscience if I thought this closet was in disorder when Mrs. Morgan was in the house.  Ever since we read ‘Golden Keys,’ last April, Diana and I have taken that verse for our motto too.”

That night John Henry Carter and Davy between them contrived to execute the two white roosters, and Anne dressed them, the usually distasteful task glorified in her eyes by the destination of the plump birds.

“I don’t like picking fowls,” she told Marilla, “but isn’t it fortunate we don’t have to put our souls into what our hands may be doing?  I’ve been picking chickens with my hands but in imagination I’ve been roaming the Milky Way.”

“I thought you’d scattered more feathers over the floor than usual,” remarked Marilla.

Then Anne put Davy to bed and made him promise that he would behave perfectly the next day.

“If I’m as good as good can be all day tomorrow will you let me be just as bad as I like all the next day?” asked Davy.

“I couldn’t do that,” said Anne discreetly, “but I’ll take you and Dora for a row in the flat right to the bottom of the pond, and we’ll go ashore on the sandhills and have a picnic.”