“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.