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

422 496

“because I thought it was part of my penance punishment and I ought to bear it patiently. It’s hard to be told you look like a scarecrow and I wanted to say something back. But I didn’t. I just swept her one scornful look and then I forgave her.
It makes you feel very virtuous when you
I mean to devote all my energies to
forgive people, doesn’t it?
being good after this and I shall never try to be beautiful again. Of course it’s better to be good. (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)C16(end superscript) I do really want to be good, Marilla, (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)like you and Mrs. Allan and Miss Stacy,(end superscript) and grow up to be a credit to you. Diana says when my hair begins to grow to tie a black velvet ribbon around my head with a bow at the side. She says she thinks it will be very becoming. I will call it a snood (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)—that sounds so romantic.(end superscript) But am I talking too much, Marilla? Does it hurt your head?”

“My head is better now. It was

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note C16
I know it is, but it’s sometimes so hard to believe a thing even when you know it.



TEXT ANNOTATION

"It makes you feel": Another place where Montgomery has interlaced two lines. They should read, "It makes you feel very virtuous when you forgive people, doesn't it? I mean to devote all my energies to being good after this and I shall never try to be beautiful again."

TEXT ANNOTATION

"snood": Before the 1930s, a "snood" was a ribbon tied around the head. The word itself is old English and Scottish for "ribbon for the hair," and Anne and Diana would have encountered the word in any number of romantic stories.

In fact, in Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, a snood is mentioned in canto XIX, the same canto that mentions the maiden with hair "as black as the raven's wing" that Anne envied in Chapter 2:

"A chieftain's daughter seemed the maid;
Her satin snood, her silken plaid,
Her golden brooch, such birth betrayed.
And seldom was a snood amid
Such wild luxuriant ringlets hid,
Whose glossy black to shame might bring
The plumage of the raven's wing."