{continuing our reading}

For as much as Anne disliked her teacher, Mr. Phillips, these chapters open up in a hilarious attempt at forgiving him for his awful transgressions. Those being making her sit by Gil – ahem, a boy – and spelling her name WITHOUT an E. Avonlea is all aflutter as a new YOUNG minister with a pretty wife is replacing old Mr. Bentley, who has served as the minister for the past 18 years. Anne disliked him because he didn’t have an imagination. Mrs. Lynde is very outspoken about the position being filled with the right person and I found it very hilarious that she was suspicious of pretty minister’s wives.

Anne wholeheartedly falls in love with Mr. and especially, Mrs. Allen. Marilla secretly wants to one up the other hostesses and invites them over for tea. Anne begs to make a cake (oh dear, can you see where this is headed?) and Marilla begrudgingly allows Anne to decorate the table with flowers, as she slyly mentions Mrs. Barry’s flower arrangements. My mouth is watering at this delicious description, except perhaps for the mention of cold tongue. I just ADORE foodie descriptions in literature, don’t you?

“…We’re going to have jellied chicken and cold tongue. We’re to have two kinds of jelly, red and yellow, and whipped cream and lemon pie, and cherry pie, and three kinds of cookies, and fruitcake, and Marilla’s famous yellow plum preserves that she keeps especially for ministers, and pound cake and layer cake, and biscuits as aforesaid and new bread and old both, in case the minister is dyspeptic and can’t eat new. Mrs. Lynde says ministers mostly dyspeptic, but I don’t think Mr. Allan has been a minister long enough for it to have had a bad effect on him. I just grow cold when I think of my layer cake. Oh, Diana, what if it shouldn’t be good! I dreamed last night that I was chased all around by a fearful goblin with a big layer cake for a head.”

p. 172

Anne wakes on the day of the tea party with a cold and quickly proceeds to make her cake. Marilla sees a peculiar expression on Mrs. Allen’s face as she tastes in and quickly takes a bite. In the end, it really was Marilla’s fault, as she put anodyne liniment in a vanilla bottle! Poor Anne couldn’t smell it because of her cold. Anne flees to the attic and wails in despair to someone who she thinks is Marilla. But it turns out to be her dear Mrs. Allen. They are fast friends after that!

“Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

“I’ll warrant you’ll make plenty in it,” said Marilla. “I never saw your beat for making mistakes, Anne.”

“Yes, and well I know it, ” admitted Anne mournfully. “But have you ever noticed one encouraging thing about me, Marilla? I never make the same mistake twice.”

“I don’t know as that’s much benefit when you’re always making new ones.”

“Oh don’t you see, Marilla? There must be a limit to the mistakes one person can make, and when I get to the end of them, then I’ll be through with them. That’s a very comforting thought.”

p.177

Mrs. Allen then invites Anne for tea at the manse and she is in raptures over it. Marilla tries to get her to manage her emotional highs and lows better. I loved this part…

“For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All “spirit and fire and dew,” as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive should and not sufficiently understanding the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate.” p.178-179 emphasis mine

Anne returns home just starry-eyed and “under a great, high-sprung sky gloried over with trails of saffron and rosy cloud”.  She is full of news and gossip about various people, but the biggest one is the coming of a lady teacher (which Mrs. Lynde disproves of, of course.) Her name is Miss Muriel Stacy.

Here is one more of Montgomery’s hauntingly beautiful passages…I love this so much:

A cool wind was blowing down over the long harvest fields from the rims of firry western hills and the whistling through the poplars. One clear star hung above the orchard and the fireflies were flitting over in Lover’s Lane, in and out among the ferns and rustling boughs. Anne watched them as she talked and somehow felt that wind and stars and fireflies were all tangled up together into something unutterably sweet and enchanting. p. 180

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