Pat of Silver Bush (1933) by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Author:Lucy Maud Montgomery [Montgomery, Lucy Maud]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-11-26T13:32:59.264000+00:00

2

There was company for supper at Silver Bush that night and Judy was too busy to pay any attention to Pat, although she watched her out of the tail of her eye. Pat had to wash the supper dishes. Ordinarily she made a saga of doing it. She liked to wash pretty dishes. Pat loved everything about the house but she loved the dishes particularly. It was such fun to make them clean and shining in the hot soapy water. She always washed her favourites first. The dishes she didn’t like had just to wait until she was good and ready for them and it was fun to picture their dumb, glowering wrath as they waited and waited and saw the others preferred before them. That hideous old brown plate with the chipped edges … how furious it got! “It’s my turn now … I’m an old family plate … I won’t be treated like this … I’ve been at Silver Bush for fifty years … that stuck-up thing with the forget-me-nots on the rim has only been here for a year.” But it always had to wait until the very last in spite of its howls. To-night Pat washed it first. Poor thing, it couldn’t help being ugly.

She was glad of bedtime and crept off in mingled moonlight and twilight, while the purple shadows gathered along the lee of the snowdrifts behind the well and the west wind in the silver bush was twisting the birches mercilessly.

And then Judy, who had been out milking, invaded the room with a resolute air.

“What do be ailing ye, Pat? Sure and if ye’re faling the way ye’ve been looking all day there’s something sarious the matter. Wandering around widout a word to throw to a dog and peering into the looking-glass be times as if ye was after seeing if the wrinkles was coming. Make a clane breast av it, darlint.”

Pat sat up.

“Oh, Judy, it’s such a terrible thing to be ugly, isn’t it, Judy? Am I so very ugly, Judy?”

“So that’s it? Oh, oh, and who’s been telling ye ye was ugly if a body may ask?”

“Nobody. But at the party Kathie Madison stood beside me in front of the glass … and I saw it for myself.”

“Oh, oh, there’s not minny girls but wud look a bit plainer than common beside me fine Kathleen. I’m not denying she’s handsome. And so was her mother afore her. But she wasn’t after getting any more husbands than her homely sister for all av that … only one and that one no great shakes I’m telling ye. Wid all her looks she tuk her pigs to a poor market. It isn’t the beauties that make the good marriages as a rule, Patsy darlint. There was Cora Davidson now at the Bay Shore. She was that good-looking the min were said to be crazy over her. But it’s the fact, Patsy darlint, and her own mother it was that tould me, there niver was but one axed her to marry him.

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