el as
if I were drinking in the sunshine."

"Yes, ma'am, so do I. That's just exactly how I feel too, ma'am," agreed
Charlotta the Fourth, who would have said precisely the same thing if
Anne had remarked that she felt like a pelican of the wilderness. Always
after Anne had visited Echo Lodge Charlotta the Fourth mounted to her
little room over the kitchen and tried before her looking glass to speak
and look and move like Anne. Charlotta could never flatter herself
that she quite succeeded; but practice makes perfect, as Charlotta had
learned at school, and she fondly hoped that in time she might catch the
trick of that dainty uplift of chin, that quick, starry outflashing
of eyes, that fashion of walking as if you were a bough swaying in the
wind. It seemed so easy when you watched Anne. Charlotta the Fourth
admired Anne wholeheartedly. It was not that she thought her so very
handsome. Diana Barry's beauty of crimson cheek and black curls was
much more to Charlotta the Fourth's taste than Anne's moonshine charm of
luminous gray eyes and the pale, everchanging roses of her cheeks.

"But I'd rather look like you than be pretty," she told Anne sincerely.

Anne laughed, sipped the honey from the tribute, and cast away the
sting. She was used to taking her compliments mixed. Public opinion
never agreed on Anne's looks. People who had heard her called handsome
met her and were disappointed. People who had heard her called plain
saw her and wondered where other people's eyes were. Anne herself would
never believe that she had any claim to beauty. When she looked in the
glass all she saw was a little pale face with seven freckles on the nose
thereof. Her mirror never revealed to her the elusive, ever-varying play
of feeling that came and went over her features like a rosy illuminating
flame, or the charm of dream and laughter alternating in her big eyes.

While Anne was not beautiful in any strictly defined sense of the word
she possessed a certain evasive charm and distinction of appearance that
left beholders with a pleasurable sense of satisfaction in that softly
rounded girlhood of hers, with all its strongly felt potentialities.
Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that
her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her. . .
the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in
an atmosphere of things about to happen.

As they picked, Charlotta the Fourt