to do a thing except bring up children. Mrs.
Morgan must be an authority on girls when she has written so much about
them, and I do want her to have a good opinion of us. I've imagined
it all out a dozen different ways . . . what she'll look like, and what
she'll say, and what I'll say. And I'm so anxious about my nose. There
are seven freckles on it, as you can see. They came at the A.V.I S.
picnic, when I went around in the sun without my hat. I suppose it's
ungrateful of me to worry over them, when I should be thankful they're
not spread all over my face as they once were; but I do wish they hadn't
come . . . all Mrs. Morgan's heroines have such perfect complexions. I
can't recall a freckled one among them."

"Yours are not very noticeable," comforted Diana. "Try a little lemon
juice on them tonight."

The next day Anne made her pies and lady fingers, did up her muslin
dress, and swept and dusted every room in the house . . . a quite
unnecessary proceeding, for Green Gables was, as usual, in the apple pie
order dear to Marilla's heart. But Anne felt that a fleck of dust would
be a desecration in a house that was to be honored by a visit from
Charlotte E. Morgan. She even cleaned out the "catch-all" closet under
the stairs, although there was not the remotest possibility of Mrs.
Morgan's seeing its interior.

"But I want to FEEL that it is in perfect order, even if she isn't to
see it," Anne told Marilla. "You know, in her book 'Golden Keys,' she
makes her two heroines Alice and Louisa take for their motto that verse
of Longfellow's,

'In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the gods see everywhere,'

and so they always kept their cellar stairs scrubbed and never forgot
to sweep under the beds. I should have a guilty conscience if I thought
this closet was in disorder when Mrs. Morgan was in the house. Ever
since we read 'Golden Keys,' last April, Diana and I have taken that
verse for our motto too."

That night John Henry Carter and Davy between them contrived to execute
the two white roosters, and Anne dressed them, the usually distasteful
task glorified in her eyes by the destination of the plump birds.

"I don't like picking fowls," she told Marilla, "but isn't it fortunate
we don't have to put our souls into what our hands may be doing? I've
been picking chickens with my hands but in imagination I've been roaming
the Milky Way."