Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

Chapter 16

264 the afternoon I was trying to think of a name for Violet Vale and it crowded other things out. Matthew was so good. He never scolded a bit. He put the tea down himself and said we could wait awhile as well as not.’ (begin subscript)^(end subscript)S8

“Matthew would think it all right, Anne, if you took a notion to get up and have dinner in the middle of the night. But you keep your wits about you this time. And—I don’t really know if I’m doing right—it may make you more addle-pated than ever—but you can ask Diana to come over and spend the afternoon with you and have tea here.”

“Oh, Marilla!” Anne clasped her hands. “How perfectly lovely!(begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)T8(end superscript) It will seem so nice and grown-uppish. No fear

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note S8
And I told him a lovely fairy story while we were waiting, so he didn't find the time long at all. It was a beautiful fairy story, Marilla. I forgot the end of it, so I made up an end for it myself and Matthew said he couldn't tell where the join came in."

LMM Note T8
You are able to imagine things after all or else you'd never have understood how I've longed for that very thing.



TEXT ANNOTATION

"Matthew couldn't tell where the join came in" [in S8]: Montgomery expanded on this type of story for Emily Byrd Starr, aspiring author, in chapter 18 of Emily Climbs (1925). Emily writes that her editor

"began to run a serial in the Times called A Bleeding Heart. … It was very long and only about half of it has appeared. … So he bade me take it and cut out 'all unnecessary stuff.' I have followed instruction mercilessly—'cutting out' most of the kisses and embraces, two-thirds of the love-making and all the descriptions, with the happy results that I have reduced it to about a quarter of its normal length; and all I can say is may heaven have mercy on the soul of the compositor who has to set it in its present mutilated condition….. 'That story in the Times—A Bleeding Heart—was the strangest one I ever read. It wandered on, chapter after chapter, for weeks, and never seemed to get anywhere, and then it just finished up in eight chapters lickety-split. I can't understand it.'"