Ana

“ I know you do not think of men—that it is to live ever in cloisters! But pray God that the man may never come, Raquel—for a girl is only a girl, after all!"
"Of course, but—"
"Oh, you would argue, because you do not know!" burst out Ana, with impatience. "Raquel, you are so good you are always beautiful; but I tell you truly, that if it should happen—all the saints could not help you. Between your vow for the soul of Rafael and your love for the one man—"
"Well, my Anita?"
"Well, you could not live through it and remain what you are. Any woman would go mad—any woman." ”

“ Bryton could see her there surrounded by the gay people, almost nunlike with the strings of black pearls around her throat as sole ornament, and in the braids of her hair the white stars of the odorous jasmine, thrust there by Ana, to break the severity of her garb. Her eyes burned like purple stars, and the pink color crept, in spite of herself, to her cheeks, and stayed there. Somewhere, she knew, one man was watching her, and each moment the terror grew that some of their many friends would bring him to her and make it impossible for him to refuse to come. ”

“ She is only a wife; it is the other who is still the woman."
Ana flung an angry look at the pessimistic, philosophic vaquero, and followed Raquel, slamming the door after her to emphasize her impatience with his all-too-true statements.
She checked her tempestuous entrance at sight of the wife they were discussing, kneeling at the little altar in the corner of her own room. The tall candles were lit, and before the shrine of the Virgin Raquel was prostrate.
Ana crossed herself and went out softly, half afraid that the argument in the corridor had been heard through the thick adobe walls. ”

“ It seemed a very far-away thing, this tryst of the star, and never—never, any day of her life, durst she dream of bringing it closer.
Ana found her huddled in the crooked white arm [295] of a great aliso tree, and regarded with dismay the quivering shoulders and face hidden against the white bark.
The Aliso Tree.
"Raquelita!" she said, in quick contrition. "I have asked too much of you, to ride with me blindfold into the wilderness. Say so, and ride back while it is yet light to reach the road. It was wrong to ask you to share burdens of others. I am at your feet, darling. ”

“ The word Ana (pronounced broadly 'Arna') corresponds with our plural 'men;' An (pronounced 'Arn') , the singular, with 'man.' The word for woman is Gy (pronounced hard, as in Guy) ; it forms itself into Gy-ei for the plural, but the G becomes soft in the plural like Jy-ei. They have a proverb to the effect that this difference in pronunciation is symbolical, for that the female sex is soft in the concrete, but hard to deal with in the individual. ”

“ They had mounted their horses when the certainty that it was not fair came upon Ana, and she slipped from the saddle and stirred up the sulking embers of the little fire until it broke into a blaze.
"Raquel, it is no use! I must tell you before we start. The man I go to see is the friend of a heretic whom you bar out from your knowledge. The message sent me is written on a letter of Bryton's. You heard them say Señor Bryton cannot be found; and there is a chance—only a chance—that he may be in the mountain where we are going." ”

“ Take what life can give you, Ana, and do not trouble about the offerings which are laid in the tombs for time to crumble.” ”

“ Anania looked on with envious eyes.
“How good lady must de Countess be!” added Agnes.
“Oh, she can be good to folks sometimes,” snarled Anania. “She’s just as full of whims as she can be—all those great folks are—proud and stuck-up and crammed full of caprice: but they say she’s kind where she takes, you know. It just depends whether she takes to you. ”

“ And, Anna, because you are good, and always have been, you shall be given a whole solar system to manage just as you like. The Heavenly Father has no end of them; He tosses them out of His hand as a boy does marbles ”

“ She was a very pretty little girl, with her mother’s black eyes and hair, and rosy cheeks, and the merry expression which was her inheritance from her father.
“This is my little girl, Diana,” said Mrs. Barry. “Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers. It will be better for you than straining your eyes over that book. She reads entirely too much—” this to Marilla as the little girls went out—“and I can’t prevent her, for her father aids and abets her. She’s always poring over a book. ”

“ It was pleasantly warm and dimly lighted by the embers of a fire in the grate.
“Let’s undress here,” said Diana. “It’s so nice and warm.”
“Hasn’t it been a delightful time?” sighed Anne rapturously. “It must be splendid to get up and recite there. Do you suppose we will ever be asked to do it, Diana?”
“Yes, of course, some day. They’re always wanting the big scholars to recite. Gilbert Blythe does often and he’s only two years older than us. Oh, Anne, how could you pretend not to listen to him? When he came to the line,
“‘There’s another, not a sister,’
he looked right down at you.” ”

“ In looking over our journals, Father says, "Anna's is about other people, Louisa's about herself." That is true, for I don't talk about myself; yet must always think of the wilful, moody girl I try to manage, and in my journal I write of her to see how she gets on. Anna is so good she need not take care of herself, and can enjoy other people. If I look in my glass, I try to keep down vanity about my long hair, my well-shaped head, and my good nose. In the street I try not to covet fine things. ”

“ I’ve got the platter, and that rain has laid the dust beautifully. So ‘all’s well that ends well.’ ”
“We’re not home yet,” said Diana rather pessimistically, “and there’s no telling what may happen before we are. You’re such a girl to have adventures, Anne.”
“Having adventures comes natural to some people,” said Anne serenely. ”

“ Then Elcana, her husband, said to her: Anna, why weepest thou? and why dost thou not eat? and why dost thou afflict thy heart? Am not I better to thee than ten children?
1:9. So Anna arose after she had eaten and drunk in Silo: And Heli, the priest, sitting upon a stool before the door of the temple of the Lord ”

“ Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now, and there were no night-lights, and it was getting darker every moment, and where was Nana? ”

“ “I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,” said Diana, “during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you—he will make it up.”
I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified; and I ran after him—he stood at the foot of the stairs. ”

“ “Why did you kill Maurice Lennox?” she asked reproachfully.
“He was the villain,” protested Anne. “He had to be punished.”
“I like him best of them all,” said unreasonable Diana.
“Well, he’s dead, and he’ll have to stay dead,” said Anne, rather resentfully. “If I had let him live he’d have gone on persecuting Averil and Perceval.”
“Yes—unless you had reformed him.”
“That wouldn’t have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too long.” ”

“ Diana announced that she would just give me time to get over the honey-moon, and then she would come and see me.
"She had better not wait till then, Jane," said Mr. Rochester, when I read her letter to him; "if she does, she will be too late, for our honey-moon will shine our life-long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine." ”

“ If thy heart should misgive thee, O nymph!—if, though cloud veil the path to the Moon, and sunshine gild that to pale Hecate—thine instinct recoils from the sunshine, while thou darest not adventure the cloud—thou hast still a choice left,—thou hast still the safe road of Diana. Hecate, O nymph! is the goddess of ghosts. If thou takest her path, look not back, for the ghosts are behind thee. When we slowly recover from the tumult and passion of some violent distress, a peculiar stillness falls upon the mind, and the atmosphere around it becomes, in that stillness, appallingly clear. ”

“ If I were writing fiction I might go on almost indefinitely with the story of Anna; but in real life stories have a curious way of coming to quick fruition, and withering away after having cast the seeds of their immortality.
"Did you see the baby?" Harriet had asked. She said no word about Anna: a BABY had come into the world. Already the present was beginning to draw the charitable curtains of its forgetfulness across this simple drama; already Harriet and Anna and all the rest of us were beginning to look to the "finest baby we ever saw in all our lives." ”

“ Sometimes I tremble, Anna, to think how near I came to passing through life without a single glimpse, a moment’s revelation of this greatest and most awful of mysteries, the mystery of primaeval nature. It is a true saying that in the mountains there is peace. One’s sense of proportion, battered out of all shape in the daily life of cities, reasserts itself. I love you still, Anna, but life holds other things than the love of man for woman. Some day I shall come back, and I will show you on canvas the things which have come to me up here amongst the eternal silence. ”

“ Anne nodded gravely. “I am sure you are right about Olga. It has always seemed to me that to her ‘Wohelo means work’ and only that.”
“And to Elizabeth it means—or will mean—service and that means, underneath—love,” said Laura, her voice full of deep feeling. “O Anne, I so long to help 68that poor child to get some of the beauty and joy of life into her little neglected soul!”
“If she has love, she has the best thing in life already,” Anne reminded. “The rest will come—in time.” ”

“ With what delight I returned to lazy days in Atuona Valley, lounging on the black paepae of my own small blue cabin in the shadow of Temiteu, idling on the sun-warm sands of the familiar beach, walking the remembered road between banana hedges heavy with yellowing fruit! The heart of man puts down roots wherever it rests; it is perhaps this sense of home that gives the zest to wandering, for new experiences gain their value from contrast with the old, and one must have felt the bondage, however light, of emotion and habit before he can know the joy of freedom from it. ”

“ Oh, Anna, Anna, where are your eyes, that you cannot see through this shallow, selfish pretender--a cad at heart, if ever there was one--who cares no more for you than for the flower in his buttonhole, who seeks you only for your money, and who would break your heart when once he had made you his wife, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning! ”

“ I might, indeed, go into the character of Anna and the whys and wherefores of her story; but there is curiously little that is strange or unusual about it. It was just Life. A few days with us worked miraculous changes in the girl; like some stray kitten brought in crying from the cold, she curled herself up comfortably there in our home, purring her contentment. She was not in the least a tragic figure: though down deep under the curves and dimples of youth there was something finally resistant, or obstinate, or defiant—which kept its counsel regarding the past. ”

“ I think I have never heard anything more beautiful than this story of Anna, who with all the delicacy of her nature, her pure, sweet womanhood, her love of the refined that always marked her, and her keen sensitiveness to the niceties of life, laid all, as a sacrifice to her Lord, in the background, and had at the same board with herself and her mother, that miserable man, thus helping him to fight the enemy of his soul and body. ”

“ Anna was above me in station as the world goes. Her father was the Governor of Urk, who would not willingly give his daughter in marriage to a poor lad such its I. But who in love is wise? Who reckons worldly wealth when love, the spirit and spring of the universe, awakens in the soul? Like birds who call their mates with love-learned songs, Anna and I loved each other, so that nothing bid, death could part us. I had promised Anna I would return rich from my voyage as others had done, when her father might be the more inclined to look with favour upon my suit. ”

“ But with the morning, the glorious unstained morning the passion of living would stir even the blood of a clod. It comes over the mountains, Anna, pink darkening into orange red, everywhere a wonderful cloud sea, scintillating with colour. It is enough to make a man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. ”

“ It hardly does her justice, for no artist can ever give a correct idea of what that face was when lighted up with life, and health, and love. I have never seen a face one half as beautiful as Anna’s. She knew that she was beautiful, but it did not make her vain, for she knew that God had given her the dangerous gift of beauty, and she tried to keep His gift unsullied, just as she tried to keep her heart pure in His sight. ”

“ Anna, in the loss of that virtue, sees herself shut out from that very world that points her to the yawning chasm of her future; she feels how like a slave in the hands of one whose heart is as cold as his smiles are false, she is. Maria owes the world no hate, nor are her thoughts disturbed by such contemplations. Anna, with embittered and remorseful feelings—with dark and terrible passions agitating her bosom, looks back over her eventful life, to a period when even her own history is shut to her, only to find the tortures of her soul heightened. ”