Anne had been thinking of something else that troubled her. “What do you suppose will become of me?” she faltered. “I never thought about planning things till now. Nobody wants me, Nelly. Mr. Poole just gives me up—though I can’t be sorry for that! If anybody wants to adopt me, all right, he says. But why should anybody want to? I’m no good. I’m just expensive.”
Nelly began to laugh, recalling how well Anne had fitted into their simple domestic life during the past two days; how many kinds of things she had learned to do in this queer summer; and how everybody was growing to like her. “Golden Girls sound expensive,” she said, “but maybe they are not so bad, when you know them.” Anne did not laugh at the old joke.
“Suppose nobody wants me?” she said. “What happens to people like that? Do they go to the poorhouse? If I could be earning my own living it would be different. But how can I, now? I don’t know enough.”
Nelly shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “We are not old enough.” She had been thinking about these things too. “But don’t forget that Uncle Eph is your grandfather. You’ve got somebody behind you, anyway. That’s more than a good many children have.”
“He didn’t say he could help,” murmured Anne. “He didn’t offer.”
“He was afraid of you,” said Nelly eagerly. “I know how it is. He thought he would seem too plain for you. He thought it was too sudden to come down from the idea of Idlewild to this house! But he wants you, I know, if you’d be happy. He said so. He thinks maybe you can do better. But he would take care of you, just as he takes care of me. We’d divide everything. We’d be like sisters, Anne. I’d let you share my mother!”
Anne turned from the window and looked at Nelly with new eyes. What a wonderful thing it would be to have a sister! Since living at camp she had begun to realize how nice it was to be close to other girls and do things together with them. She and Nelly really were cousins, that was certain. And how different Nelly seemed to her now that she knew her better. How unselfish she was!
“We’ll be like sisters anyway,” she said impulsively, “but the Captain—Grandfather—couldn’t support another big girl like me?”
“He isn’t poor,” said Nelly. “We can both learn to do something. Then some day we can both pay him back. What will you be, Anne?”
Anne had never really thought of being anything until this moment. “Be? Why—I’d like to be a teacher,” she said suddenly. The idea popped into her head like an inspiration. “I’d like to teach foreigners how to become good ‘squares’ in the Patchwork Quilt, as Tante calls it. Oh yes! And I’d like to learn how to take care of little children like the children around here. I’d like to be able to nurse them or doctor them when they can’t get a doctor in a hurry. I wish I could make up to this place for the things I had when I was little, when I didn’t know who was paying for them. I didn’t know it, but I was a Pig!”