Fancy going to sleep in it when the wind was rocking it.
If I wasn’t a human girl I think I’d like to be a bee and live among the flowers.”
“Yesterday you wanted to be a sea gull,” sniffed Marilla.
“I think you are very fickle minded.
I told you to learn that prayer and not talk.
But it seems impossible for you to stop talking if you’ve got anybody that will listen to you.
So go up to your room and learn it.”
“Oh, I know it pretty nearly all now—all but just the last line.”
“Well, never mind, do as I tell you.
Go to your room and finish learning it well, and stay there until I call you down to help me get tea.”
“Can I take the apple blossoms with me for company?” pleaded Anne.
“No; you don’t want your room cluttered up with flowers.
You should have left them on the tree in the first place.”
“I did feel a little that way, too,” said Anne.
“I kind of felt I shouldn’t shorten their lovely lives by picking them—I wouldn’t want to be picked if I were an apple blossom.
But the temptation was irresistible.
What do you do when you meet with an irresistible temptation?”
“Anne, did you hear me tell you to go to your room?”
Anne sighed, retreated to the east gable, and sat down in a chair by the window.
“There—I know this prayer.
I learned that last sentence coming upstairs. Now I’m going to imagine things into this room so that they’ll always stay imagined.
The floor is covered with a white velvet carpet with pink roses all over it and there are pink silk curtains at the windows.
The walls are hung with gold and silver brocade tapestry.
The furniture is mahogany.
I never saw any mahogany, but it does sound so luxurious.
This is a couch all heaped with gorgeous silken cushions, pink and blue and crimson and gold, and I am reclining gracefully on it.
I can see my reflection in that splendid big mirror hanging on the wall.
I am tall and regal, clad in a gown of trailing white lace, with a pearl cross on my breast and pearls in my hair.
My hair is of midnight darkness and my skin is a clear ivory pallor.
My name is the Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald. No, it isn’t—I can’t make that seem real.”
She danced up to the little looking-glass and peered into it.
Her pointed freckled face and solemn gray eyes peered back at her.
“You’re only Anne of Green Gables,” she said earnestly, “and I see you, just as you are looking now, whenever I try to imagine I’m the Lady Cordelia.
But it’s a million times nicer to be Anne of Green Gables than Anne of nowhere in particular, isn’t it?”
She bent forward, kissed her reflection affectionately, and betook herself to the open window.
“Dear Snow Queen, good afternoon.
And good afternoon dear birches down in the hollow.
And good afternoon, dear gray house up on the hill.
I wonder if Diana is to be my bosom friend.
I hope she will, and I shall love her very much.
But I must never quite forget Katie Maurice and Violetta.
They would feel so hurt if I did and I’d hate to hurt anybody’s feelings, even a little bookcase girl’s or a little echo girl’s.
I must be careful to remember them and send them a kiss every day.”
Anne blew a couple of airy kisses from her fingertips past the cherry blossoms and then, with her chin in her hands, drifted luxuriously out on a sea of daydreams.
CHAPTER IX.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Properly Horrified
ANNE had been a fortnight at Green Gables before Mrs. Lynde arrived to inspect her.
Mrs. Rachel, to do her justice, was not to blame for this.
A severe and unseasonable attack of grippe had confined that good lady to her house ever since the occasion of her last visit to Green Gables.
Mrs. Rachel was not often sick and had a well-defined contempt for people who were; but grippe, she asserted, was like no other illness on earth and could only be interpreted as one of the special visitations of Providence.