Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the twenty-seventh chapter of Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

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Chapter Won't fight adventures and mountains We Can climb take it worth for word line but line we fight at a time.

Welcome to Bite at a Time Books, where we read you your favorite classics one byte at a time.

My name is Brie Carlyle, and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.

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You can catch us on all the social medias at Bite at a Time Books or on our website, Bite atotimebooks.com today we'll be continuing anne of the island by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Chapter 27 Mutual Confidences march came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an Elfland of moonshine.

Over the girls at Patty's place was falling the shadow of April examinations.

They were studying hard.

Even Phil had settled down to text and notebooks with a doggedness not to be expected of her.

I'm going to take the Johnson Scholarship in mathematics, she announced calmly.

I could take the one in Greek easily, but I'd rather take the mathematical one because I want to prove to Jonas that I'm really enormously clever.

Jonas likes you better for your big brown eyes and your crooked smile than for all the brains you carry under your curls, said Anne.

When I was a girl, it wasn't considered ladylike to know anything about mathematics, said Aunt Jamesina.

The times have changed.

I don't know that it's all for the better.

Can you cook, Phil?

No.

I never cooked anything in my life except a gingerbread, and it was a failure.

Flat in the middle and hilly round the edges.

You know the kind.

But Auntie, when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook, don't you think the brains that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship will also enable me to learn cooking?

Just as well?

Maybe, said Aunt Jamesina cautiously.

I'm not decrying the higher education of women.

My daughter is an M A.

She can cook, too, but I taught her to cook before I let a college professor teach her mathematics.

In midmarch came a letter from Ms.

Patty Spaford saying that she and Ms.

Maria had decided to remain abroad for another year.

So you may have Patty's place next winter, too, she wrote.

Maria and I are going to run over Egypt.

I want to see the Sphinx once before I die.

Fans see those two dames running over Egypt.

I wonder if they'll look up at the Sphinx and knit, laughed Priscilla.

I'm so glad we can keep Patty's place for another year, said Stella.

I was afraid they'd come back, and then our jolly little nest here would be broken up and we poor Kalo nestlings, thrown out on the cool world of boarding houses again.

I'm off for a tramp in the park, announced Phil, tossing her books aside.

I think when I'm 80, I'll be glad I went for a walk in the park tonight.

What do you mean?

Asked Anne.

Come with me and I'll tell you.

Honey.

They captured in their ramble all the mysteries and magics of a March evening very still and mild it was, wrapped in a great white, brooding silence, a silence which was yet threaded through with many little silvery sounds which you could hear if you hearkened as much with your soul as your ears.

The girls wandered down along pineland aisle that seemed to lead right out into the heart of a deep red overflowing winter sunset.

Go home and write a poem this blessed minute.

If I only knew how, declared Phil, pausing in an open space where a rosy light was staining the green tips of the pines.

It's also wonderful here, this great white stillness and those dark trees that always seem to be thinking the woods were God's first temples, quoted Anne softly.

One can't help feeling reverent and adoring in such a place.

I always feel so near him when I walk among the pines.

Anne, I'm the happiest girl in the world, confessed Phil suddenly.

So Mr.

Blake has asked you to marry him at last, said Anne calmly.

Yes, and I sneezed three times while he was asking me.

Wasn't that horrid?

But I said yes almost before he finished.

I was so afraid he might change his mind and stop.

I'm decidedly happy.

I couldn't really believe before that Jonas would ever care for frivolous me.

Phil, you're not really frivolous, said Anne gravely.

Way down underneath that frivolous exterior of yours, you've got a dear, loyal, womanly soul.

Why do you hide it so?

I can't help it, Queen Anne.

You're right.

I'm not frivolous at heart.

But there's a sort of frivolous skin over my soul, and I can't take it off.

As Mrs.

Poyser says, I'd have to be hatched over again and hatched different before I could change it.

But Jonas knows the real me and loves me, frivolity and all, and I love him.

I never was so surprised in my life as I was when I found out I loved him.

I'd never thought it possible to fall in love with an ugly man.

Fancy meat coming down to one solitary bow and one named Jonas.

But I mean to call him Joe.

That's such a nice, crisp little name.

I couldn't nickname Alonzo.

What about Alec and Alonzo?

Oh, I told them at Christmas that I never could marry either of them.

It seems so funny now to remember that I ever thought it possible that I might.

They felt so badly, I just cried over both of them.

How old?

But I knew there was only one man in the world I could ever marry.

I had made up my own mind for once and it was real easy, too.

It's very delightful to feel so sure and know it's your own sureness and not somebody else's.

Do you suppose you'll be able to keep it up?

Making up my mind, you mean?

I don't know.

But Joe has given me a splendid rule.

He says when I'm perplexed just to do what I would wish I had done.

When I shall be 80.

Anyhow, Joe can make up his mind quickly enough.

And it would be uncomfortable to have too much mind in the same house.

What will your father and mother say?

Father won't say much.

He thinks everything I do right.

But Mother will talk.

Oh, her tongue will be as irony as her nose.

But in the end it will be all right.

You'll have to give up a good many things you've always had when you marry Mr.

Blake, Phil.

But I'll have him.

I won't miss.

The other things were to be married a year from next June.

Joe graduates from St.

Columbia this spring, you know.

Then he's going to take a little mission church down on Patterson Street in the slums.

Fancy me in the slums.

But I'd go there, order Greenland's icy mountains with him.

And this is the girl who would never marry a man who wasn't rich, commented Anne to a young pine tree.

Oh, don't cast up the follies of my youth to me.

I shall be poor as gaily as I've been rich.

You'll see, I'm going to learn how to cook and make overdresses.

I've learned how to market since I've lived at Patty's place.

And once I taught a Sunday school class for the whole summer.

Aunt Jamesina says I'll ruin Joe's career if I marry him.

But I won't.

I know I haven't much sense or sobriety, but I've got what is ever so much better the knack of making people like me.

There's a man in bowling broke who lisps and always testifies in prayer meeting.

He says if you can't thine like an electric satar thine like a candlestick, I'll be Joe's little candlestick.

Phil, you're incorrigible.

Well, I love you so much that I can't make nice, light, congratulatory little speeches.

But I'm heart glad of your happiness.

I know those big gray eyes of yours are brimming over with real friendship.

Anne, someday I'll look the same way at you.

You're going to marry Roy, aren't you, Anne?

My dear Felipa, did you ever hear of the famous Betty Baxter who refused a man before he'd axed her?

I'm not going to emulate that celebrated lady by either refusing or accepting anyone before he axes me.

Hall Redmond knows that Roy is crazy about you, said Phil candidly.

And you do love him, don't you, Anne?

I suppose so, said Anne reluctantly.

She felt that she ought to be blushing while making such a confession, but she was not.

On the other hand, she always blushed hotly when anyone said anything about Gilbert Blythe or Christine Stewart in her hearing.

Gilbert Blythe and Christine Stewart were nothing to her, absolutely nothing.

But Anne had given up trying to analyze the reason of her blushes.

As for Roy, of course she was in love with him madly, so how could she help it?

Was he, not her ideal, who could resist those glorious dark eyes and that pleading voice?

Were not half the redman girls wildly envious?

And what a charming sonnet he had sent her with a box of violets on her birthday and knew every word of it by heart.

It was very good stuff of its kind, too.

Not exactly up to the level of Keats or Shakespeare even.

Anne was not so deeply in love as to think that.

But it was very tolerable magazine verse, and it was addressed to her.

Not to Laura or Beatrice or the Maid of Athens, but to her, Anne Shirley.

To be told in rhythmical cadences that her eyes were stars of the morning, that her cheek had the flush it stole from the sunrise, that her lips were redder than the roses of paradise, was thrillingly romantic.

Gilbert would never have dreamed of riding a sonnet to her eyebrows.

But then Gilbert could see a joke she had once told Roy a funny story, and he had not seen the point of it.

She recalled the chummy laugh she and Gilbert had had together over it and wondered uneasily if life with a man who had no sense of humor might not be somewhat uninteresting in the long run.

But who could expect a melancholy, inscrutable hero to see the humorous side of things?

It would be flatly unreasonable.

Thank you for joining Byte at the Time Books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.

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My name is Brie Carlyle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of ane of the island.