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 18 - (VERSO)

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but I think that would be too exciting. I’d rather have just one in his right mind. But Ruby Gillis knows a great deal about such matters because she has so many big sisters and Mrs. Lynde says the Gillis girls have gone off like hotcakes. Mr. Phillips goes up to see Prissy Andrews nearly every evening. He says it is to help her with her lessons but Miranda Sloane is studying for Queen’s, too, and I should think she needed help a lot more than Prissy because she’s ever so much stupider but he never goes to help her in the evenings at all. There are a great many things in this world that I can’t understand very


TEXT ANNOTATION

"Mr. Phillips goes up to see Prissy Andrews nearly every evening.": Montgomery herself was once courted by one of her teachers. During her year in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, she was visited by her teacher Mr. Mustard, who she described as awkward and often ill-humoured. He did, sort of, propose just before she returned to Cavendish in 1891, "Mustard actually mustered—oh, forgive the pun. It just made itself—up enough courage to put his fate to the test this evening." (Complete Journals, The P.E.I. Years Volume 1, p. 77). She shut down the proposal, but she did receive the odd letter from him in the years following. And the Mustard home was close to the Macdonald's when they lived in Leaskdale, Ontario.