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 33 - (VERSO)

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of it paralyzed her energies completely. Everything was so strange, and bewildering so brilliant, so bewildering – the row of ladies in evening dress, the critical faces, the whole atmosphere of wealth and culture about her. Very different this from the plain benches of the Debating Club, filled with the homely, sympathetic faces of friends and neighbors. These people, she thought, would be merciless critics. She felt Perhaps, like the white-lace girl, they anticipated amusement from her “rustic” efforts. She felt hopelessly, helplessly ashamed and miserable. Her knees trembled, her heart fluttered, a horrible faintness came over her; not a word could she utter, and the next moment she would have fled from the platform despite


PHOTO ANNOTATION

the bottom part of a scrapbook page showing two white calling cards, a paper embroidery of Montgomery's name, and a photo of a woman with a pompadour

"the Debating Club": Anne juxtaposes the "brilliant" and "bewildering" experience of the concert with the homemade fun of the Avonlea community doings. Montgomery's scrapbook show a similar distinction. Here, the calling cards for two writers, American Miriam Zieber, and Montgomery's long-time Scottish pen-pal, George Boyd MacMillan, are perhaps reminders (to herself) that she had aspirations and connections beyond the "plain benches" of Cavendish (p. 7 of the Red Scrapbook, Imagining Anne, p. 105).
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