“She’s much prettier like you,” said Mr. Lavender gallantly, though secretly he was a little hurt.
But he soon got over it. By the time Anne was one and a bit, he had decided that the only color for very small fat girls was fair. He used to gaze at her sometimes, and say to himself, “I shan’t let her marry that fellow Winks now, she’s much too good for him. She’s lovely—and just like her Mother.”
And then another very surprising thing happened. Her hair suddenly became red. Not golden-red or chestnut-red, but really-carrotty-red. Red! And nobody in Mr. Lavender’s family or Mrs. Lavender’s family had ever had red hair before!
It was then that one or two people began calling her Poor Anne. They didn’t all do it at first—just one or two of them. “What a pity about Poor Anne,” they said. “She used to have such lovely flaxen hair.” And when they were talking about Christmas presents, they used to say, “And, of course, there’s Poor Anne; we mustn’t forget her.”
Mr. Lavender was terribly upset about it all. He wrote to the editors of several papers, and asked them to say whether, if a child’s hair had once not been red, and then was red, whether it would ever not be red again, if it once hadn’t been. Some of them didn’t answer, and some said that Time Would Show, and two of them said that Red Hair was Very Becoming. But, of course, that wasn’t what Mr. Lavender wanted to know.
Mrs. Lavender didn’t mind so much. She had just decided to have another baby called David Lavender.
David was fair. Fairer than Anne had ever been, fairer than his Mother had ever been. All his aunts came and looked at him, and they said to each other, “Isn’t his hair lovely?” And then they all said to each other, “What a pity about Poor Anne!”
Poor Anne didn’t mind. She was much too happy taking care of her little brother. You see, she knew why her own hair had gone red. It was because she had caught that terrible cold when she was two, through getting her feet wet. So it was most important that David should never, never catch cold, because a girl with carrotty hair was just Poor Anne, but a boy with carrotty hair was Oh-poor-David. And her Father would be so miserable that he wouldn’t ever write to the papers again, and it would be all her fault.
So she did all she possibly could to keep David’s hair the right color, and she did it so well that one day Mr. Lavender said:
“Poor Anne. She won’t be beautiful, but she’ll be very useful, and I think I shall let her marry the Winks fellow after all.”