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.”