"Why, I've seen Diana Blythe wearing that ring often," said Peggy MacAllister contemptuously.
"And I don't believe one single word you've been saying about Ingleside, Delilah Green," said Laura Carr.
Before Delilah could reply Diana, who had recovered her powers of locomotion and speech, dashed into the schoolroom.
"Judas!" she said. Afterwards she thought repentantly that it had not been a very ladylike thing to say. But she had been stung to the heart and when your feelings are all stirred up you can't pick and choose your words.
"I ain't Judas!" muttered Delilah, flushing, probably for the first time in her life.
"You are! There isn't one spark of sincerity in you! Don't you ever speak to me again as long as you live!”
Diana rushed out of the schoolhouse and ran home. She couldn't stay in school that afternoon ... she just couldn't! The Ingleside front door was banged as it had never been banged before.
"Darling, what is the matter?" asked Anne, interrupted in her kitchen conference with Susan by a weeping daughter who flung herself stormily against the maternal shoulder.
The whole story was sobbed out, somewhat disjointedly.
"I've been hurt in all my FINER FEELINGS, Mother. And I'll never believe in anyone again!”
"My dear, all your friends won't be like this. Pauline wasn't.”
"This is TWICE," said Diana bitterly, still smarting under the sense of betrayal and loss. "There isn't going to be any third time.”
"I'm sorry Di has lost her faith in humanity," said Anne rather ruefully, when Di had gone upstairs. "This is a real tragedy for her. She HAS been unlucky in some of her chums. Jenny Penny ... and now Delilah Green. The trouble is Di always falls for the girls who can tell interesting stories. And Delilah's martyr pose was very alluring.”
"If you ask me, Mrs. Dr. dear, that Green child is a perfect minx,” said Susan, all the more implacably because she had been so neatly fooled herself by Delilah's eyes and manners. "The idea of her calling our cats mangy! I am not saying that there are not such things as tomcats, Mrs. Dr. dear, but little girls should not talk of them. I am no lover of cats, but the Shrimp is seven years old and should at least be RESPECTED. And as for my potato pot ...”
But Susan really couldn't express her feelings about the potato pot.
In her own room Di was reflecting that perhaps it was not too late to be "best friends" with Laura Carr after all. Laura was TRUE, even if she wasn't very exciting. Di sighed. Some colour HAD gone out of life with her belief in Delilah's piteous lot.
Chapter 39
A bitter east wind was snarling around Ingleside like a shrewish old woman. It was one of those chill, drizzly, late August days that take the heart out of you, one of those days when everything goes wrong ... what in old Avonlea days had been called "a Jonah day." The new pup Gilbert had brought home for the boys had gnawed the enamel off the dining table leg ... Susan had found that the moths had been having a Roman holiday in the blanket closet ... Nan's new kitten had ruined the choicest fern ... Jem and Bertie Shakespeare had been making the most abominable racket in the garret all the afternoon with tin pails for drums ... Anne herself had broken a painted glass lampshade. But somehow it had done her good just to hear it smash! Rilla had had earache and Shirley had a mysterious rash on his neck, which worried Anne but at which Gilbert only glanced casually and said in an absent-minded voice that he didn't think it meant anything. Of course it didn't mean anything to HIM! Shirley was only his own son! And it didn't matter to him either that he had invited the Trents to dinner one evening last week and forgotten to tell Anne until they arrived.
She and Susan had had an extra busy day and had planned a pick-up supper. And Mrs. Trent with the reputation of being Charlottetown's smartest hostess! WHERE were Walter's stockings with the black tops and the blue toes? "Do you think, Walter, that you could JUST FOR ONCE put a thing where it belongs? Nan, I DON'T know where the Seven Seas are. For mercy's sake, stop asking questions! I don't wonder they poisoned Socrates. They OUGHT to have.”
Walter and Nan stared. Never had they heard their mother speak in such a tone before. Walter's look annoyed Anne still more.
"Diana, is it necessary to be forever reminding you not to twist your legs around the piano stool? Shirley, if you haven't got that new magazine all sticky with jam! And perhaps SOMEBODY would be kind enough to tell me where the prisms of the hanging lamp have gone!”
Nobody could tell her ... Susan having unhooked them and taken them out to wash them ... and Anne whisked herself upstairs to escape from the grieved eyes of her children. In her own room she paced up and down feverishly. WHAT was the matter with her? Was she turning into one of those peevish creatures who had no patience with anybody? Everything annoyed her these days. A little mannerism of Gilbert's she had never minded before got on her nerves. She was sick-and-tired of never-ending, monotonous duties ... sick-and-tired of catering to her family's whims. Once everything she did for her house and household gave her delight.
Now she did not seem to care what she did. She felt all the time like a creature in a nightmare, trying to overtake someone with fettered feet.
The worst of it all was that Gilbert never noticed that there was any change in her. He was busy night and day and seemed to care for nothing but his work. The only thing he had said at dinner that day had been "Pass the mustard, please.”
"I can talk to the chairs and table, of course," thought Anne bitterly. "We're just getting to be a sort of HABIT with each other ... nothing else. He never noticed that I had on a new dress last night. And it's so long since he called me 'Anne-girl' that I've forgotten when. Well, I suppose all marriages come to this in the end. Probably most women go through this. He just takes me for granted. His work is the only thing that means anything to him now. WHERE is my handkerchief?”
Anne got her handkerchief and sat down in her chair to torture herself luxuriantly. Gilbert didn't love her any more. When he kissed her he kissed her absently ... just "habit." All the glamour was gone. Old jokes they had laughed together over came up in recollection, charged with tragedy now. How could she ever have thought them funny? Monty Turner who kissed his wife systematically once a week ... made a memorandum to remind him. ("Would any wife want such kisses?") Curtis Ames who met his wife in a new bonnet and didn't know her. Mrs. Clancy Dare who had said, "I don't care an awful lot about my husband but I'd miss him if he wasn't round.” ("I suppose Gilbert would miss me if I weren't around! Has it come to that with us?") Nat Elliott who told his wife after ten years of marriage, "if you must know I'm just tired of being married." ("And we've been married fifteen years!") Well, perhaps all men were like that. Probably Miss Cornelia would say that they were. After a time they were hard to hold. ("If my husband has to be 'held' I don't want to hold him.") But there was Mrs. Theodore Clow who had said proudly at a Ladies' Aid, "We've been married twenty years and my husband loves me as much as he did on our wedding day." But perhaps she was deceiving herself or only "keeping face." And she looked every day of her age and more. ("I wonder if I am beginning to look old.") For the first time her years felt like a weight. She went to the mirror and looked at herself critically. There WERE some tiny crow's-feet around her eyes but they were only visible in a strong light. Her chin lines were yet unblurred. She had always been pale. Her hair was thick and wavy without a grey thread. But did anybody REALLY like red hair? Her nose was still definitely good.
Anne patted it as a friend, recalling certain moments of life when her nose was all that carried her through. But Gilbert just took her nose for granted now. It might be crooked or pug, for all it mattered to him. Likely he had forgotten that she HAD a nose.