Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/168

 Irene was not as Mrs. Elliott would say, of the race that knew Joseph. Milla did not say or think that she had outgrown Irene. Had the thought occurred to her she would have considered it absurd when she was not yet seventeen and Irene was twenty. But it was the truth. Irene was just what she had been a year ago—just what she would always be. Rilla Blythe’s nature in that year had changed and matured and deepened. She found herself seeing through Irene with a disconcerting clearness—discerning under all her superficial sweetness her pettiness, her vindictiveness, her insincerity, her essential cheapness. Irene had lost forever her faithful worshipper.

But not until Rilla had traversed the Upper Glen Road and found herself in the moon-dappled solitude of Rainbow Valley did she fully recover her composure of spirit. Then she stopped under a tall wild plum that was ghostly white and fair in its misty spring-bloom and laughed.

“There is only one thing of importance just now—and that is that the Allies win the war,” she said aloud. “Therefore, it follows without dispute that the fact that I went to see Irene Howard with odd shoes and stockings on is of no importance whatever. Nevertheless, I Bertha Marilla Blythe, swear solemnly with the moon as witness”—Rilla lifted her hand dramatically to the said moon,—“that I will never leave my room again without looking carefully at both my feet.”