Page:Anne's house of dreams (1920 Canada).djvu/14

 inimitable gesture of motherhood which always sent through Anne’s heart, filled with sweet, unuttered dreams and hopes, a thrill that was half pure pleasure and half a strange, ethereal pain.

“Yes. That was what I wanted to tell you when I ’phoned to you to come down today. By the way, I can’t realize that we really have telephones in Avonlea now. It sounds so preposterously up-to-date and modernish for this darling, leisurely old place.”

“We can thank the A. V. I. S. for them,” said Diana. “We should never have got the line if they hadn’t taken the matter up and carried it through. There was enough cold water thrown to discourage any society. But they stuck to it, nevertheless. You did a splendid thing for Avonlea when you founded that society, Anne. What fun we did have at our meetings! Will you ever forget the blue hall and Judson Parker’s scheme for painting medicine advertisements on his fence?”

“I don’t know that I’m wholly grateful to the A. V. I. S. in the matter of the telephone,” said Anne. “Oh, I know it’s most convenient—even more so than our old device of signalling to each other by flashes of candlelight! And, as Mrs. Rachel says, ‘Avonlea must keep up with the procession, that’s what.’ But somehow I feel as if I didn’t want Avonlea spoiled by what Mr. Harrison, when he wants to be witty, calls ‘modern inconveniences.’ I should like to have it kept always just as it was in the dear old years.