Chapter XXVII

Mutual Confidences

March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs,

bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by

a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of

moonshine.

Over the girls at Patty’s Place was falling the shadow of April

examinations. They were studying hard; even Phil had settled down to

text and notebooks with a doggedness not to be expected of her.

“I’m going to take the Johnson Scholarship in Mathematics,” she

announced calmly. “I could take the one in Greek easily, but I’d rather

take the mathematical one because I want to prove to Jonas that I’m

really enormously clever.”

“Jonas likes you better for your big brown eyes and your crooked smile

than for all the brains you carry under your curls,” said Anne.

“When I was a girl it wasn’t considered lady-like to know anything

about Mathematics,” said Aunt Jamesina. “But times have changed. I

don’t know that it’s all for the better. Can you cook, Phil?”

“No, I never cooked anything in my life except a gingerbread and it was

a failure—flat in the middle and hilly round the edges. You know the

kind. But, Aunty, when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook don’t

you think the brains that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship

will also enable me to learn cooking just as well?”

“Maybe,” said Aunt Jamesina cautiously. “I am not decrying the higher

education of women. My daughter is an M.A. She can cook, too. But I

taught her to cook _before_ I let a college professor teach her

Mathematics.”

In mid-March came a letter from Miss Patty Spofford, saying that she

and Miss Maria had decided to remain abroad for another year.

“So you may have Patty’s Place next winter, too,” she wrote. “Maria and

I are going to run over Egypt. I want to see the Sphinx once before I

die.”

“Fancy those two dames ‘running over Egypt’! I wonder if they’ll look

up at the Sphinx and knit,” laughed Priscilla.

“I’m so glad we can keep Patty’s Place for another year,” said Stella.

“I was afraid they’d come back. And then our jolly little nest here

would be broken up—and we poor callow nestlings thrown out on the cruel

world of boardinghouses again.”

“I’m off for a tramp in the park,” announced Phil, tossing her book

aside. “I think when I am eighty I’ll be glad I went for a walk in the

park tonight.”

“What do you mean?” asked Anne.

“Come with me and I’ll tell you, honey.”

They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March

evening. Very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great, white,

brooding silence—a silence which was yet threaded through with many

little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much

with your soul as your ears. The girls wandered down a long pineland

aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep-red,

overflowing winter sunset.

“I’d go home and write a poem this blessed minute if I only knew how,”

declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining

the green tips of the pines. “It’s all so wonderful here—this great,

white stillness, and those dark trees that always seem to be thinking.”

“‘The woods were God’s first temples,’” quoted Anne softly. “One can’t

help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place. I always feel so

near Him when I walk among the pines.”

“Anne, I’m the happiest girl in the world,” confessed Phil suddenly.

“So Mr. Blake has asked you to marry him at last?” said Anne calmly.

“Yes. And I sneezed three times while he was asking me. Wasn’t that

horrid? But I said ‘yes’ almost before he finished—I was so afraid he

might change his mind and stop. I’m besottedly happy. I couldn’t really

believe before that Jonas would ever care for frivolous me.”

“Phil, you’re not really frivolous,” said Anne gravely. “‘Way down

underneath that frivolous exterior of yours you’ve got a dear, loyal,

womanly little soul. Why do you hide it so?”

“I can’t help it, Queen Anne. You are right—I’m not frivolous at heart.

But there’s a sort of frivolous skin over my soul and I can’t take it

off. As Mrs. Poyser says, I’d have to be hatched over again and hatched

different before I could change it. But Jonas knows the real me and

loves me, frivolity and all. And I love him. I never was so surprised

in my life as I was when I found out I loved him. I’d never thought it

possible to fall in love with an ugly man. Fancy me coming down to one

solitary beau. And one named Jonas! But I mean to call him Jo. That’s

such a nice, crisp little name. I couldn’t nickname Alonzo.”

“What about Alec and Alonzo?”

“Oh, I told them at Christmas that I never could marry either of them.

It seems so funny now to remember that I ever thought it possible that

I might. They felt so badly I just cried over both of them—howled. But

I knew there was only one man in the world I could ever marry. I had

made up my own mind for once and it was real easy, too. It’s very

delightful to feel so sure, and know it’s your own sureness and not

somebody else’s.”

“Do you suppose you’ll be able to keep it up?”

“Making up my mind, you mean? I don’t know, but Jo has given me a

splendid rule. He says, when I’m perplexed, just to do what I would

wish I had done when I shall be eighty. Anyhow, Jo can make up his mind

quickly enough, and it would be uncomfortable to have too much mind in

the same house.”

“What will your father and mother say?”

“Father won’t say much. He thinks everything I do right. But mother

_will_ talk. Oh, her tongue will be as Byrney as her nose. But in the

end it will be all right.”

“You’ll have to give up a good many things you’ve always had, when you

marry Mr. Blake, Phil.”

“But I’ll have _him_. I won’t miss the other things. We’re to be

married a year from next June. Jo graduates from St. Columbia this

spring, you know. Then he’s going to take a little mission church down

on Patterson Street in the slums. Fancy me in the slums! But I’d go

there or to Greenland’s icy mountains with him.”

“And this is the girl who would _never_ marry a man who wasn’t rich,”

commented Anne to a young pine tree.

“Oh, don’t cast up the follies of my youth to me. I shall be poor as

gaily as I’ve been rich. You’ll see. I’m going to learn how to cook and

make over dresses. I’ve learned how to market since I’ve lived at

Patty’s Place; and once I taught a Sunday School class for a whole

summer. Aunt Jamesina says I’ll ruin Jo’s career if I marry him. But I

won’t. I know I haven’t much sense or sobriety, but I’ve got what is

ever so much better—the knack of making people like me. There is a man

in Bolingbroke who lisps and always testifies in prayer-meeting. He

says, ‘If you can’t thine like an electric thtar thine like a

candlethtick.’ I’ll be Jo’s little candlestick.”

“Phil, you’re incorrigible. Well, I love you so much that I can’t make

nice, light, congratulatory little speeches. But I’m heart-glad of your

happiness.”

“I know. Those big gray eyes of yours are brimming over with real

friendship, Anne. Some day I’ll look the same way at you. You’re going

to marry Roy, aren’t you, Anne?”

“My dear Philippa, did you ever hear of the famous Betty Baxter, who

‘refused a man before he’d axed her’? I am not going to emulate that

celebrated lady by either refusing or accepting any one before he

‘axes’ me.”

“All Redmond knows that Roy is crazy about you,” said Phil candidly.

“And you _do_ love him, don’t you, Anne?”

“I—I suppose so,” said Anne reluctantly. She felt that she ought to be

blushing while making such a confession; but she was not; on the other

hand, she always blushed hotly when any one said anything about Gilbert

Blythe or Christine Stuart in her hearing. Gilbert Blythe and Christine

Stuart were nothing to her—absolutely nothing. But Anne had given up

trying to analyze the reason of her blushes. As for Roy, of course she

was in love with him—madly so. How could she help it? Was he not her

ideal? Who could resist those glorious dark eyes, and that pleading

voice? Were not half the Redmond girls wildly envious? And what a

charming sonnet he had sent her, with a box of violets, on her

birthday! Anne knew every word of it by heart. It was very good stuff

of its kind, too. Not exactly up to the level of Keats or

Shakespeare—even Anne was not so deeply in love as to think that. But

it was very tolerable magazine verse. And it was addressed to _her_—not

to Laura or Beatrice or the Maid of Athens, but to her, Anne Shirley.

To be told in rhythmical cadences that her eyes were stars of the

morning—that her cheek had the flush it stole from the sunrise—that her

lips were redder than the roses of Paradise, was thrillingly romantic.

Gilbert would never have dreamed of writing a sonnet to her eyebrows.

But then, Gilbert could see a joke. She had once told Roy a funny

story—and he had not seen the point of it. She recalled the chummy

laugh she and Gilbert had had together over it, and wondered uneasily

if life with a man who had no sense of humor might not be somewhat

uninteresting in the long run. But who could expect a melancholy,

inscrutable hero to see the humorous side of things? It would be flatly

unreasonable.