you hide it so?"

"I can't help it, Queen Anne. You are right--I'm not frivolous at heart.
But there's a sort of frivolous skin over my soul and I can't take it
off. As Mrs. Poyser says, I'd have to be hatched over again and hatched
different before I could change it. But Jonas knows the real me and
loves me, frivolity and all. And I love him. I never was so surprised
in my life as I was when I found out I loved him. I'd never thought it
possible to fall in love with an ugly man. Fancy me coming down to one
solitary beau. And one named Jonas! But I mean to call him Jo. That's
such a nice, crisp little name. I couldn't nickname Alonzo."

"What about Alec and Alonzo?"

"Oh, I told them at Christmas that I never could marry either of them.
It seems so funny now to remember that I ever thought it possible that I
might. They felt so badly I just cried over both of them--howled. But I
knew there was only one man in the world I could ever marry. I had made
up my own mind for once and it was real easy, too. It's very delightful
to feel so sure, and know it's your own sureness and not somebody
else's."

"Do you suppose you'll be able to keep it up?"

"Making up my mind, you mean? I don't know, but Jo has given me a
splendid rule. He says, when I'm perplexed, just to do what I would
wish I had done when I shall be eighty. Anyhow, Jo can make up his mind
quickly enough, and it would be uncomfortable to have too much mind in
the same house."

"What will your father and mother say?"

"Father won't say much. He thinks everything I do right. But mother WILL
talk. Oh, her tongue will be as Byrney as her nose. But in the end it
will be all right."

"You'll have to give up a good many things you've always had, when you
marry Mr. Blake, Phil."

"But I'll have HIM. I won't miss the other things. We're to be married
a year from next June. Jo graduates from St. Columbia this spring, you
know. Then he's going to take a little mission church down on Patterson
Street in the slums. Fancy me in the slums! But I'd go there or to
Greenland's icy mountains with him."

"And this is the girl who would NEVER marry a man who wasn't rich,"
commented Anne to a young pine tree.

"Oh, don't cast up the follies of my youth to me. I shall be poor as
gaily as I've been rich. You'll see. I'm going to learn how to cook
and make over dresses. I've learned how to market since I've lived
at Patty's Place; and once I taught a Sunday School class for a