when I wanted to catch up Gog and Magog and bang their pert black noses together! Oh, you smile, Anne—but it was never funny to me. I would come here and see you and Gilbert with your books and your flowers, and your household goods, and your little family jokes—and your love for each other showing in every look and word, even when you didn’t know it—and I would go home to—you know what I went home to! Oh, Anne, I don’t believe I’m jealous and envious by nature. When I was a girl I lacked many things my schoolmates had, but I never cared—I never disliked them for it. But I seem to have grown so hateful—”
“Leslie, dearest, stop blaming yourself. You are not hateful or jealous or envious. The life you have to live has warped you a little, perhaps-but it would have ruined a nature less fine and noble than yours. I’m letting you tell me all this because I believe it’s better for you to talk it out and rid your soul of it. But don’t blame yourself any more.”
“Well, I won’t. I just wanted you to know me as I am. That time you told me of your darling hope for the spring was the worst of all, Anne. I shall never forgive myself for the way I behaved then. I repented it with tears. And I did put many a tender and loving thought of you into the little dress I made. But I might have known that anything I made could only be a shroud in the end.”
