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 - (VERSO)

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Her face hardened. Mrs. Barry was a lady woman of strong prejudices and dislikes and her anger was of the cold sullen sort which is always hardest to overcome. To do her justice, she really believed Anne had made Diana drunk out of sheer malice(begin strikethrough),(end strikethrough)(begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)prepense,(end superscript) and she was honestly anxious to preserve her d little daughter from the contamination of further intimacy with such a child.

“What do you want?” she said stiffly.

Anne clasped her hands.

“Oh, Mrs. Barry, please forgive me. I did not mean to make – to – intoxicate Diana. How could I? Just imagine if you were a poor little (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)orphan(end superscript) girl that kind people had adopted and you had just one bosom friend in all the world. Do you think you would intoxicate her on purpose? I thought it was only


TEXT ANNOTATION

"sheer malice prepense": Rubio and Waterston identify the old French legal phrase, meaning "spitefulness thought out in advance” as one used in the first chapter of Sir Walter Scott's (1819) novel Ivanhoe, one of Montgomery's favourites. Norton, p. 108, n. 6.