The Annals of Ann

by Kate Trimble Sharber

Ann Lisbeth has to work for a living. She does embroidery—exquisite embroidery, and lace work that looks like charlotte russe. She is the kind of looking girl that you'd expect to have a dressing-table covered with silver things and eat marshmallows and ice-cream all the time. She is what Cousin Eunice calls a "lotus-eater." This like to have worried me to death at first, for I misunderstood it and imagined it was something like eating roaches. I wasn't going to blame Ann Lisbeth for it even if it was like roaches, for I thought maybe it was the style in her country across the ocean. What is one nation's style would turn another's stomach; and everybody likes what he was raised on, even Chinese rats and Limburger cheese.

It was very romantic the way Ann Lisbeth met Doctor Gordon. She had gone down to the florist's one slippery day to spend her last quarter for white hyacinths to cheer her mother up when she had the good fortune to slip down and break her arm. Doctor Gordon happened to be passing at the time in his automobile and he carried her to the hospital and fixed the arm. He said white hyacinths were his favorite flower, too, so he sends them to her and her mother every day.

Poor Doctor Gordon! He's having a hard time to make a living like every other young doctor. He says sometimes he has a whole month of blue Mondays come right together. And he says every time he happens to wake up with a headache he also has a blowout in his best tire and gets a notice from the bank that he's overdrawn the same day.

I liked him extremely well myself for a while, and he seemed to like me. He called me his little sweetheart, but I soon saw that a little sweetheart has to take a big back seat when there's a grown one around.

Mother and I have been laughing all day about a little affair that happened here last winter while I was away at school.

After Christmas mother and father went back to stay at Rufe's with me a few days, for they said the place was so lonesome when I left they couldn't stand it. Of course they met Doctor Gordon and Ann Lisbeth, for we were always at each other's house, either to learn a Mount Mellick stitch or to play a piece from a new opera. Mother liked Ann Lisbeth's sweet ways so much that she said she just must come down and make her a visit before she thought of getting married.

About the time for the first jonquils to bloom, early in February, mother wrote that they reminded her so much of me and made her so lonesome, that she wished Ann Lisbeth would come on then. So she packed her suit-case and went.

Everybody knows how the people in a little place will look at a stranger that comes in, because they're so tired of looking at each other. So they stared at her from the station clear up to the house. Now, city people never get any enjoyment out of staring unless they see somebody in trouble, such as an unfortunate young man with his shoulder to the wheel, trying to repair a puncture, by the side of a muddy road. Then they stare, and giggle too.

There were several young men at the station that day, and, as Ann Lisbeth went down there not breathing to a soul that she was engaged, they came near losing their minds over her beautiful skin and foreign accent.

The one of them that seemed to be most impressed was a bore—no, he wasn't just an every-day kind of bore that asks you if this is your first visit to that place and tells you afterward that he never has been so impressed in his life on short acquaintance. I've heard Cousin Eunice talk about them, but this man wasn't like that sort of bore. He was a perfect auger. Many a time when he has dropped in to see father of an evening and I would have to put my book down for politeness' sake, I've sat there and pinched my face, the side that was turned away from him, till it was black and blue, to keep awake. Pinching your arm or leg wouldn't have done any good with this man—you had to pinch up close to your brain.