e life magnificent? It's so funny to think I hated it that
first day. But if I hadn't I might never got really acquainted with you.
Anne, please tell me over again that you like me a little bit. I yearn
to hear it."

"I like you a big bit--and I think you're a dear, sweet, adorable,
velvety, clawless, little--kitten," laughed Anne, "but I don't see when
you ever get time to learn your lessons."

Phil must have found time for she held her own in every class of her
year. Even the grumpy old professor of Mathematics, who detested coeds,
and had bitterly opposed their admission to Redmond, couldn't floor her.
She led the freshettes everywhere, except in English, where Anne Shirley
left her far behind. Anne herself found the studies of her Freshman year
very easy, thanks in great part to the steady work she and Gilbert had
put in during those two past years in Avonlea. This left her more time
for a social life which she thoroughly enjoyed. But never for a moment
did she forget Avonlea and the friends there. To her, the happiest
moments in each week were those in which letters came from home. It
was not until she had got her first letters that she began to think
she could ever like Kingsport or feel at home there. Before they came,
Avonlea had seemed thousands of miles away; those letters brought it
near and linked the old life to the new so closely that they began to
seem one and the same, instead of two hopelessly segregated existences.
The first batch contained six letters, from Jane Andrews, Ruby Gillis,
Diana Barry, Marilla, Mrs. Lynde and Davy. Jane's was a copperplate
production, with every "t" nicely crossed and every "i" precisely
dotted, and not an interesting sentence in it. She never mentioned the
school, concerning which Anne was avid to hear; she never answered one
of the questions Anne had asked in her letter. But she told Anne how
many yards of lace she had recently crocheted, and the kind of weather
they were having in Avonlea, and how she intended to have her new dress
made, and the way she felt when her head ached. Ruby Gillis wrote a
gushing epistle deploring Anne's absence, assuring her she was horribly
missed in everything, asking what the Redmond "fellows" were like, and
filling the rest with accounts of her own harrowing experiences with her
numerous admirers. It was a silly, harmless letter, and Anne would have
laughed over it had it not been for the postscript. "Gilbert seems to be
enjoying Redmond,