The Queens Class Is Organized

"Anne," said Marilla abruptly, "Miss Stacy was here this
afternoon when you were out with Diana."

Anne came back from her other world with a start and a sigh.

"Was she? Oh, I'm so sorry I wasn't in. Why didn't you call me,
Marilla? Diana and I were only over in the Haunted Wood. It's
lovely in the woods now. All the little wood things--the ferns
and the satin leaves and the crackerberries--have gone to sleep,
just as if somebody had tucked them away until spring under a
blanket of leaves. I think it was a little gray fairy with a
rainbow scarf that came tiptoeing along the last moonlight night
and did it. Diana wouldn't say much about that, though. Diana
has never forgotten the scolding her mother gave her about
imagining ghosts into the Haunted Wood. It had a very bad effect
on Diana's imagination. It blighted it. Mrs. Lynde says Myrtle
Bell is a blighted being. I asked Ruby Gillis why Myrtle was
blighted, and Ruby said she guessed it was because her young man
had gone back on her. Ruby Gillis thinks of nothing but young men,
and the older she gets the worse she is. Young men are all very
well in their place, but it doesn't do to drag them into
everything, does it? Diana and I are thinking seriously of
promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old
maids and live together forever. Diana hasn't quite made up her
mind though, because she thinks perhaps it would be nobler to
marry some wild, dashing, wicked young man and reform him. Diana
and I talk a great deal about serious subjects now, you know. We
feel that we are so much older than we used to be that it isn't
becoming to talk of childish matters. It's such a solemn thing
to be almost fourteen, Marilla. Miss Stacy took all us girls who
are in our teens down to the brook last Wednesday, and talked to
us about it. She said we couldn't be too careful what habits we
formed and what ideals we acquired in our teens, because by the
time we were twenty our characters would be developed and the
foundation laid for our whole future life. And she said if the
foundation was shaky we could never build anything really worth
while on it. Diana and I talked the matter over coming home from
school. We felt extremely solemn, Marilla. And we decided that
we would try to be very careful indeed and form respectable
habits and learn all we could and be as sensible as possible, so
that by the time we were twenty our characters would be properly
developed. It's perfectly appalling to think of being twenty,
Marilla. It sounds so fearfully old and grown up. But why was
Miss Stacy here this afternoon?"