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 2

38

imagine that red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, ‘Now, my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven’s wing.’ But all the time I know it is just plain red and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow. I read of a girl once in a novel who had a lifelong sorrow but it wasn’t red hair. Her hair was pure gold, rippling back from her alabaster brow. What is an alabaster brow. I never could find out. Can you tell me?”

“Well, now, I’m afraid I can’t,” said Matthew who was getting a little dizzy. O1

“Well, whatever it was it must have been something nice because she was divinely beautiful[.] (begin superscript)P1(end superscript) Which would you rather be if you had the choice — divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”

“Well, now, I — I don’t know exactly.”

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note O1
He felt as he had once felt in his rash youth when another boy had enticed him on the merry go round at a picnic.

LMM Note P1
Have you ever imagined what it must feel like to be divinely beautiful?"
"Well, now, no, I haven't," confessed Matthew ingenuously.
"I have often[.]"


TEXT ANNOTATION

"black as the raven's wing": In Scott's "Lady of the Lake," which Anne and Montgomery knew well, are these lines: "Such wild luxuriant ringlets hid, / Whose glossy black to shame might bring / The plumage of the raven's wing." Anne will reference these lines again later in the story.