"
"I must be getting old, Gilbert." Mrs. Blythe laughed a trifle ruefully.
"People are beginning to tell me I look so young. They never tell you
that when you are young. But I shall not worry over my silver thread. I
never liked red hair. Gilbert, did I ever tell you of that time, years
ago at Green Gables, when I dyed my hair? Nobody but Marilla and I knew
about it."
"Was that the reason you came out once with your hair shingled to the
bone?"
"Yes. I bought a bottle of dye from a German Jew pedlar. I fondly
expected it would turn my hair black--and it turned it green. So it had
to be cut off."
"You had a narrow escape, Mrs. Dr. dear," exclaimed Susan. "Of course
you were too young then to know what a German was. It was a special
mercy of Providence that it was only green dye and not poison."
"It seems hundreds of years since those Green Gables days," sighed Mrs.
Blythe. "TThey belonged to another world altogether. Life has been cut
in two by the chasm of war. What is ahead I don't know--but it can't be
a bit like the past. I wonder if those of us who have lived half our
lives in the old world will ever feel wholly at home in the new."
"Have you noticed," asked Miss Oliver, glancing up from her book, "how
everything written before the war seems so far away now, too? One feels
as if one was reading something as ancient as the Iliad. This poem of
Wordsworth's--the Senior class have it in their entrance work--I've
been glancing over it.
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