is only to cook a dinner for her. You won’t mind, will you?”
“Goodness, I’m not so fond of stewing over a hot fire in July that it would vex me very much to have some one else do it. You’re quite welcome to the job.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Anne, as if Marilla had just conferred a tremendous favour, “I’ll make out the menu this very night.”
“You’d better not try to put on too much style,” warned Marilla, a little alarmed by the high-flown sound of “menu.” “You’ll likely come to grief if you do.”
“Oh, I’m not going to put on any ‘style,’ if you mean trying to do or have things we don’t usually have on festal occasions,” assured Anne. “That would be affectation, and, although I know I haven’t as much sense and steadiness as a girl of seventeen and a schoolteacher ought to have, I’m not so silly as that. But I want to have everything as nice and dainty as possible. Davy-boy, don’t leave those pea-pods on the back stairs . . . someone might slip on them. I’ll have a light soup to begin with . . . you know I can make lovely cream-of-onion soup . . . and then a couple of roast fowls. I’ll have the two white roosters. I have real affection for those roosters and they’ve been pets ever since the gray hen hatched out just the two of them . . . little balls of yellow down. But I know they would have to be sacrificed sometime, and surely there couldn’t be a
