S. in the matter of the telephone," said Anne. "Oh, Iknow it's most convenient-- even more so than our old device of signalling to each other by flashes of candlelight! And, as Mrs. Rachel says, `Avonlea must keep up with the procession, that's what.' But somehow I feel as if I didn't want Avonlea spoiled by what Mr.
Harrison, when he wants to be witty, calls `modern inconveniences.' I should like to have it kept always just as it was in the dear old years. That's foolish--and sentimental--and impossible. So I shall immediately become wise and practical and possible.
The telephone, as Mr. Harrison concedes, is `a buster of a good thing'--even if you do know that probably half a dozen interested people are listening along the line.""That's the worst of it," sighed Diana. "It's so annoying to hear the receivers going down whenever you ring anyone up. They say Mrs. Harmon Andrews insisted that their `phone should be put in their kitchen just so that she could listen whenever it rang and keep an eye on the dinner at the same time. Today, when you called me, I distinctly heard that queer clock of the Pyes' striking. So no doubt Josie or Gertie was listening.""Oh, so that is why you said, `You've got a new clock at Green Gables, haven't you?' I couldn't imagine what you meant. I heard a vicious click as soon as you had spoken. I suppose it was the Pye receiver being hung up with profane energy. Well, never mind the Pyes. As Mrs. Rachel says, `Pyes they always were and Pyes they always will be, world without end, amen.' I want to talk of pleasanter things. It's all settled as to where my new home shall be.""Oh, Anne, where? I do hope it's near here.""No-o-o, that's the drawback. Gilbert is going to settle at Four Winds Harbor--sixty miles from here.""Sixty! It might as well be six hundred," sighed Diana. "I never can get further from home now than Charlottetown.""You'll have to come to Four Winds. It's the most beautiful harbor on the Island. There's a little village called Glen St. Mary at its head, and Dr. David Blythe has been practicing there for fifty years. He is Gilbert's great-uncle, you know. He is going to retire, and Gilbert is to take over his practice. Dr.
Blythe is going to keep his house, though, so we shall have to find a habitation for ourselves. I don't know yet what it is, or where it will be in reality, but Ihave a little house o'dreams all furnished in my imagination--a tiny, delightful castle in Spain.""Where are you going for your wedding tour?" asked Diana.
"Nowhere. Don't look horrified, Diana dearest. You suggest Mrs. Harmon Andrews. She, no doubt, will remark condescendingly that people who can't afford wedding `towers' are real sensible not to take them;and then she'll remind me that Jane went to Europe for hers. I want to spend MY honeymoon at Four Winds in my own dear house of dreams.""And you've decided not to have any bridesmaid?""There isn't any one to have. You and Phil and Priscilla and Jane all stole a march on me in the matter of marriage; and Stella is teaching in Vancouver. I have no other `kindred soul' and I won't have a bridesmaid who isn't.""But you are going to wear a veil, aren't you?" asked Diana, anxiously.
"Yes, indeedy. I shouldn't feel like a bride without one. I remember telling Matthew, that evening when he brought me to Green Gables, that I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would ever want to marry me--unless some foreign missionary did. I had an idea then that foreign missionaries couldn't afford to be finicky in the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those daydreams we once planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best dressed man I ever met, and he raved over Priscilla's `ethereal, golden beauty.' But of course there are no cannibals in Japan.""Your wedding dress is a dream, anyhow," sighed Diana rapturously. "You'll look like a perfect queen in it--you're so tall and slender. How DO you keep so slim, Anne? I'm fatter than ever--I'll soon have no waist at all.""Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination," said Anne. "At all events, Mrs.
Harmon Andrews can't say to you what she said to me when I came home from Summerside, `Well, Anne, you're just about as skinny as ever.' It sounds quite romantic to be `slender,' but `skinny' has a very different tang.""Mrs. Harmon has been talking about your trousseau.
She admits it's as nice as Jane's, although she says Jane married a millionaire and you are only marrying a `poor young doctor without a cent to his name.'"Anne laughed.
"My dresses ARE nice. I love pretty things. Iremember the first pretty dress I ever had--the brown gloria Matthew gave me for our school concert. Before that everything I had was so ugly. It seemed to me that I stepped into a new world that night.""That was the night Gilbert recited `Bingen on the Rhine,' and looked at you when he said, `There's another, NOT a sister.' And you were so furious because he put your pink tissue rose in his breast pocket! You didn't much imagine then that you would ever marry him.""Oh, well, that's another instance of predestination,"laughed Anne, as they went down the garret stairs.
