Page:Anne's house of dreams (1920 Canada).djvu/17

 “But you are going to wear a veil, aren’t you?” asked Diana, anxiously.

“Yes, indeedy. I shouldn’t feel like a bride without one. I remember telling Matthew, that evening when he brought me to Green Gables, that I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would ever want to marry me—unless some foreign missionary did. I had an idea then that foreign missionaries couldn’t afford to be finicky in the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among cannibals. You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla married. He was as handsome and inscrutable as those daydreams we once planned to marry ourselves, Diana; he was the best dressed man I ever met, and he raved over Priscilla’s ‘ethereal, golden beauty.’ But of course there are no cannibals in Japan.”

“Your wedding dress is a dream, anyhow,” sighed Diana rapturously. “You’ll look like a perfect queen in it—you’re so tall and slender. How do you keep so slim, Anne? I’m fatter than ever—I’ll soon have no waist at all.”

“Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination,” said Anne. “At all events, Mrs. Harmon Andrews can’t say to you what she said to me when I came home from Summerside, ‘Well, Anne, you’re just about as skinny as ever.’ It sounds quite romantic to be ‘slender,’ but ‘skinny’ has a very different tang.”