Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the first chapter of Anne's House of Dreams.

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Today we'll be starting Anne's House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Chapter one in the Garrett of Green Gables.

Thanks, B.

I'm done with geometry.

Learning or teaching it, said Anne Shirley, a trifle vindictively, as she thumped a somewhat battered volume of euclid into a big chest of books, banged the lid in triumph, and sat down upon it, looking at Diana Wright across the green gable's Garrett with grey eyes that were like a morning sky.

That Garrett was a shadowy, suggestive, delightful place, as all Garrett should be through the open window by which Anne sat with a sweet scented sunwarm air of the August afternoon outside poplar, boughs, rustled and tussed in the wind.

Beyond them were the woods where Lover's Lane wound its enchanted path, and the old apple orchard which still boards rosy harvests munificently, and overall was a great mountain range of snowy clouds in the blue southern sky.

Through the other window was glimpsed a distant, white capped blue sea beautiful St.

Lawrence Gulf, on which floats like a jewel Abigailate, whose softer, sweeter Indian name has long been forsaken for the more prosaic one of Prince Edward Island.

Diana Wright, three years older than when we last saw her, had grown somewhat matronly in the intervening time, but her eyes were as black and brilliant, her cheeks as rosy, and her dimples as enchanting as in the long ago days when she and Anne Shirley had vowed eternal friendship in the garden at Orchard Slope.

In her arm she held a small, sleeping black curled creature who for two happy years had been known to the world of Avon Lee, a small Anne Cordelia.

Avonlee folks knew why Diana had called her Anne, of course, but Avonlee folks were puzzled by the Cordelia.

There had never been a Cordelia in the right or berry connections.

Mrs.

Harmon, Andrew said.

She supposed Diana had found the name in some trashy novel and wondered that Fred hadn't more sense than to allow it.

But Diana and Anne smiled at each other.

They knew how small Anne Cordelia had come by her name.

Eh, who always hated geometry, said Diana with a retrospective smile.

I should think you'd be real glad to be through with teaching anyhow.

Oh, I've always liked teaching apart from geometry.

These past three years in summerside have been very pleasant ones.

Mrs.

Harmon Andrews told me when I came home that I wouldn't likely find married life as much better than teaching as I expected.

Evidently Mrs.

Harmon is of Hamlet's opinion that it may be better to bear the ills that we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Anne's laugh, as blithe and irresistible as of yore, with an added note of sweetness and maturity, rang through the garret marilla in the kitchen below.

Compounding blue plum preserve heard it and smiled, then sighed.

To think how seldom that dear laugh would echo through green gables in the years to come.

Nothing in her life had ever given Marilla so much happiness as the knowledge that Anne was going to marry Gilbert wife.

But every joy must bring with it its little shadow of sorrow.

During the three summerside years, Anne had been home often for vacations and weekends, but after this, a biannual visit would be as much as could be hoped for.

You needn't let what Mrs.

Harmon says were you, said Diana, with the calm assurance of the four years matron.

Married life has its ups and downs, of course.

You mustn't expect that everything will always go smoothly, but I can assure you, Anne, that it's a happy life when you're married to the right man.

Anne smothered a smile.

Diana's, heirs of vast experience, always amused her a little.

I dare say I'll be putting them on, too when I've been married for years, she thought.

Surely my sense of humor will preserve me from it, though.

Is it settled yet where you're going to live?

Asked Diana, cuddling small Anne Cordelia, with the imitable gesture of motherhood, which always sent through Anne's heart, filled with sweet, unuttered dreams and hopes, a thrill that was half pure pleasure and half a strange, ethereal pain.

Yes, that was what I wanted to tell you when I phoned to you to come down today.

By the way, I can't realize that we really have telephones in Avonlee now.

It sounds so preposterously up to date and modernish for this darling, leisurely old place.

We can thank the Avis for them, said Diana.

We should never have got the line if they hadn't taken the matter up and carried it through.

There was enough cold water throne to discourage any society, but they stuck to it nevertheless.

You did a splendid thing for Avonlea when you founded that society, Ann.

What fun we did have at our meetings.

Will you ever forget the blue hull and Judson Parker's scheme for painting medicine advertisements on his fence?

I don't know that I'm wholly grateful to the avis in the matter of the telephone, said Anne.

Oh, I know it's most convenient.

Even more so than our old device of signaling to each other by flashes of candlelight.

And as Mrs.

Rachel says, avon Lee must keep up with the procession, that's what.

But somehow I feel as if I didn't want Avonlee spoiled.

By what Mr.

Harrison.

When what he wants to be witty calls modern inconveniences, I should like to have it kept always, just as it was in the dear old years.

That's foolish and sentimental and impossible.

So I shall immediately become wise and practical and possible.

The telephone, as Mr.

Harrison concedes, is a buster of a good thing, even if you do know that probably half a dozen interested people are listening along the line.

That's the worst of it, sighed Diana.

It's so annoying to hear the receivers going down.

Whenever you ring anyone up, they say Mrs.

Harmon Andrews insisted that their phone should be put in their kitchen just so that she could listen whenever it rang and keep an eye on the dinner.

At the same time, today when you called me, I distinctly heard that queer clock of the pies striking so.

No doubt Josie or Gertie was listening.

Oh, so that is why you said you've got a new clock at Green Gables, haven't you?

I couldn't imagine what you meant.

I heard a vicious click as soon as you had spoken.

I suppose it was the pie receiver being hung up with profane energy.

We'll never mind the pies, as Mrs.

Rachel says.

Pies they always were, and pies they always will be, world without end.

Amen.

I want to talk of pleasanter things.

It's all settled as to where my new home shall be.

Oh, Anne.

Where?

I do hope it's near here.

No, that's the drawback.

Gilbert is going to settle at Four Winds Harbor, 60 miles from here.

60?

It might as well be 600, sighed Diana.

I never can get further from a home now than Charlottetown.

You'll have to come to Four Winds.

It's the most beautiful harbor on the island.

There's a little village called Glenn St.

Mary at its head, and Dr.

David Blythe has been practicing there for 50 years.

He's Gilbert's great uncle, you know.

He's going to retire, and Gilbert is going to take over his practice.

Dr.

Blithe is going to keep his house, though, so we shall have to find a habitation for ourselves.

I don't know yet what it is or where it will be in reality, but I have a little house of dreams, all furnished in my imagination.

A tiny, delightful castle in Spain.

Where are you going for your wedding tour?

Asked Diana.

Nowhere.

Don't look horrified, Diana, dearest.

You suggest Mrs.

Harmon Andrews, she no doubt will remark condescendingly that people who can't afford wedding towers are real sensible not to take them.

And then she'll remind me that Jane went to Europe for hers.

I want to spend my honeymoon at Four Wins in my own dear house of dreams.

And you've decided not to have any brides made.

There isn't anyone to have.

You and Phil and Priscilla and Jane all stole a march on me in the matter of marriage, and Stella is teaching in Vancouver.

I have no other kindred soul, and I won't have a bridesmaid who isn't.

But you are going to wear a veil, aren't you?

Asked Diana anxiously.

Yes, indeed.

I shouldn't feel like a bride without one.

I remember telling Matthew that evening when he brought me to Green Gables that I never expected to be a bride because I was so homely no one would ever want to marry me unless some foreign missionary did.

I had an idea then that foreign missionaries couldn't afford to be finicky in the matter of looks if they wanted a girl to risk her life among cannibals.

You should have seen the foreign missionary Priscilla married.

He was as handsome and inscrutable as those daydreams we once planned to marry ourselves.

Diana.

He was the best dressed man I ever met, and he raved over Priscilla's ethereal golden beauty.

But of course, there are no cannibals in Japan.

Your wedding dress is a dream anyhow, sighed Diana rapturously.

You look like a perfect queen in it.

You're so tall and slender.

How do you keep so slim, Anne?

I'm fatter than ever.

I'll soon have no waste at all.

Stoutness and slimness seem to be matters of predestination, said Anne.

At all events, Mrs.

Harmon Andrews can't say to you what she said to me when I came home from Summerside.

Well, Anne, you're just about as skinny as ever.

It sounds quite romantic to be slender, but skinny has a very different tang.

Mrs.

Harmon has been talking about your Trusseau.

She admits it's as nice as Jane's, although she says Jane married a millionaire, and you are only marrying a poor young doctor without a scent to his name.

Anne laughed, my dresses are nice.

I love pretty things.

I remember the first pretty dress I ever had.

The brown Gloria Matthew gave me for our school concert.

Before that, everything I had was so ugly it seemed to me that I stepped into a new world that night.

That was the night Gilbert recited being in on the Rhine and looked at you when he said, there's another, not a sister.

And you were so furious because he put your pink tissue rose in his breast pocket.

You didn't much imagine then that you would ever marry him.

Well, that's another instance of predestination, laughed Anne as they went down the Garrett stairs.

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

Again.

My name is Brie Carlyle, and I hope you come back tomorrow for the next bite of Anne's House of Dreams.

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