“Changes ain’t totally pleasant but they’re excellent things,” said Mr. Harrison philosophically. “Two years is about long enough for things to stay exactly the same. If they stayed put any longer they might grow mossy.”
Mr. Harrison was smoking on his veranda. His wife had self-sacrificingly told that he might smoke in the house if he took care to sit by an open window. Mr. Harrison rewarded this concession by going outdoors altogether to smoke in fine weather, and so mutual goodwill reigned.
Anne had come over to ask Mrs. Harrison for some of her yellow dahlias. She and Diana were going through to Echo Lodge that evening to help Miss Lavendar and Charlotta the Fourth with their final preparations for the morrow’s bridal. Miss Lavendar herself never had dahlias; she did not like them and they would not have suited the fine retirement of her old-fashioned garden. But flowers of any kind were rather scarce in Avonlea and the neighboring districts that summer, thanks to Uncle Abe’s storm; and Anne and Diana thought that a certain old cream-colored stone jug, usually kept sacred to doughnuts, brimmed over with yellow dahlias, would be just the thing to set in a dim angle of the stone house stairs, against the dark background of red hall paper.
“I s’pose you’ll be starting off for college in a fortnight’s time?” continued Mr. Harrison. “Well, we’re going to miss you an awful lot, Emily and me. To be sure, Mrs. Lynde’ll be over there in your place. There ain’t nobody but a substitute can be found for them.”
The irony of Mr. Harrison’s tone is quite untransferable to paper. In spite of his wife’s intimacy with Mrs. Lynde, the best that could be said of the relationship between her and Mr. Harrison even under the new regime, was that they preserved an armed neutrality.
“Yes, I’m going,” said Anne. “I’m very glad with my head . . . and very sorry with my heart.”
“I s’pose you’ll be scooping up all the honors that are lying round loose at Redmond.”
“I may try for one or two of them,” confessed Anne, “but I don’t care so much for things like that as I did two years ago. What I want to get out of my college course is some knowledge of the best way of living life and doing the most and best with it. I want to learn to understand and help other people and myself.”
Mr. Harrison nodded.
“That’s the idea exactly. That’s what college ought to be for, instead of for turning out a lot of B.A.‘s, so chock full of book-learning and vanity that there ain’t room for anything else. You’re all right. College won’t be able to do you much harm, I reckon.”