Rilla of Ingleside

by Lucy Maud Montgomery




CHAPTER I



GLEN "NOTES" AND OTHER MATTERS

It was a warm, golden-cloudy, lovable afternoon. In the big living-room
at Ingleside Susan Baker sat down with a certain grim satisfaction
hovering about her like an aura; it was four o'clock and Susan, who had
been working incessantly since six that morning, felt that she had
fairly earned an hour of repose and gossip. Susan just then was
perfectly happy; everything had gone almost uncannily well in the
kitchen that day. Dr. Jekyll had not been Mr. Hyde and so had not grated
on her nerves; from where she sat she could see the pride of her heart--
the bed of peonies of her own planting and culture, blooming as no other
peony plot in Glen St. Mary ever did or could bloom, with peonies
crimson, peonies silvery pink, peonies white as drifts of winter snow.

Susan had on a new black silk blouse, quite as elaborate as anything
Mrs. Marshall Elliott ever wore, and a white starched apron, trimmed
with complicated crocheted lace fully five inches wide, not to mention
insertion to match. Therefore Susan had all the comfortable
consciousness of a well-dressed woman as she opened her copy of the