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 27

418 492

its original red. Z15

“Oh, Marilla, what shall I do?” questioned Anne (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)in tears.(end superscript) “I can never live this down. People have pretty well forgotten my other mistakes—the liniment cake and setting Diana drunk and flying int into a temper with Mrs. Lynde. But they’ll never forget this. Oh Marilla [T]hey will think I am not respectable. Oh, Marilla, ‘what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!’ That is poetry but it is so true. And oh, how Josie Pye will laugh! I am Marilla, I cannot face Josie Pye. I am the unhappiest girl in Prince Edward Island.”

Anne’s unhappiness continued for a week. During that time she went nowhere and shampooed her hair every day. A16 At the end of the week Marilla said decidedly,

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note Z15
The pedlar had certainly spoken the truth when he declared that the dye wouldn’t wash off, however his veracity ought to be impeached in other respects.

LMM Note A16
Diana alone of outsiders knew the fatal secret, but she promised solemnly never to tell and it may be stated here and now that she kept her word.


TEXT ANNOTATION

"What a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!": From Sir Walter Scott’s (1808) Marmion,6.17.27-28. A Tangled Web (1931) was Montgomery’s later-in-life social satire (with a kindly twist).

TEXT ANNOTATION

"That is poetry but it is true.": A comic allusion to the fact that many people (of Marilla’s generation or other background) distrusted poetry and fiction. The Macneill household was more appreciative of poetry and select fiction.