"I don't know what has got into the child," said Anne worriedly.
"She has never behaved like this before. As you say, that Penny girl seems to have bewitched her.”
"You were quite right in refusing to let her go to a place so far beneath her, Mrs. Dr. dear.”
"Oh, Susan, I don't want her to feel that anyone is 'beneath' her.
But we must draw the line somewhere. It's not Jenny so much ... I think she's harmless enough apart from her habit of exaggeration ... but I'm told the boys are really dreadful. The Mowbray Narrows teacher is at her wits'-end with them.”
"Do they TRYannize over you like that?" asked Jenny loftily when Di told her she was not to be allowed to go. "I wouldn't let anyone use ME like that. I have too much spirit. Why, I sleep out of doors all night whenever I take the notion. I s'pose you'd never dream of doing that?”
Di looked wistfully at this mysterious girl who had "often slept out all night." How wonderful!
"You don't blame me for not going, Jenny? You know I want to go?”
"Of course I don't blame you. SOME girls wouldn't put up with it, of course, but I s'pose you just can't help it. We could have had fun. I'd planned we'd go fishing by moonlight in our back brook.
We often do. I've caught trout THAT long. And we have the dearest little pigs and a new foal that's just sweet and a litter of puppies. Well, I guess I must ask Sadie Taylor. HER father and mother let her call her soul her own.”
"My father and mother are very good to me," protested Di loyally.
"And my father is the best doctor in P. E. Island. Everyone says so.”
"Putting on airs because you have a father and mother and I have none," said Jenny disdainfully. "Why, MY father has wings and always wears a golden crown. But I don't go about with my head in the air on that account, do I? Now, Di, I don't want to quarrel with you but I hate to hear anyone bragging about their folks.
It's not etiket. And I have made up my mind to be a lady. When that Persis Ford you're always talking of comes to Four Winds this summer I am not going to 'sociate with her. There's something queer about her ma, Aunt Lina says. She was married to a dead man and he come alive.”
"Oh, it wasn't like that at all, Jenny. I know ... Mother told me... Aunt Leslie ...”
"I don't want to hear about her. Whatever it is, it's something that'd better not be talked of, Di. There's the bell.”
"Are you really going to ask Sadie?" choked Di, her eyes widening with hurt.
"Well, not right at once. I'll wait and see. Maybe I'll give you one more chance. But if I do it will be the last.”
A few days later Jenny Penny came to Di at recess.
"I heard Jem saying your pa and ma went away yesterday and wouldn't be back till tomorrow night?”
"Yes, they went up to Avonlea to see Aunt Marilla.”
"Then it's YOUR CHANCE.”
"My chance?”
"To stay all night with me.”
"Oh, Jenny ... but I couldn't.”
"Of course you can. Don't be a ninny. They'll never know.”
"But Susan wouldn't let me ...”
"You don't have to ask her. Just come home with me from school.
Nan can tell her where you've gone so she won't be worried. And she won't tell on you when your pa and ma come back. She'll be too scared they'd blame her.”
Di stood in an agony of indecision. She knew perfectly well she should not go with Jenny, but the temptation was irresistible.
Jenny turned the full battery of her extraordinary eyes upon Di.
"This is your LAST CHANCE," she said dramatically. "I can't go on 'sociating with anyone who thinks herself too good to visit me. If you don't come we PART FOREVER.”
That settled it. Di, still in the thrall of Jenny Penny's fascination, couldn't face the thought of parting forever. Nan went home alone that afternoon to tell Susan that Di had gone to stay all night with that Jenny Penny.
Had Susan been her usual active self she would have gone straight to the Pennys and brought Di home. But Susan had strained her ankle that morning and while she could make shift to hobble around and get the children's meals she knew she could never walk a mile down the Base Line road. The Pennys had no telephone and Jem and Walter flatly refused to go. They were invited to a mussel-bake at the lighthouse and nobody would eat Di at the Pennys'. Susan had to resign herself to the inevitable.
Di and Jenny went home across the fields, which made it little more than a quarter of a mile. Di, in spite of her prodding conscience, was happy. They went through so much beauty ... little bays of bracken, elfin haunted, in the bays of deep-green woods, a rustling windy hollow where you waded knee-deep in butter-cups, a winding lane under young maples, a brook that was a rainbow scarf of blossom, a sunny pasture field full of strawberries. Di, just wakening to a perception of the loveliness of the world, was enraptured and almost wished Jenny wouldn't talk so much. That was all right at school but here Di wasn't sure she wanted to hear about the time Jenny poisoned herself ... 'zackzidentally of course ... by taking the wrong kind of medicine. Jenny painted her dying agonies finely but was somewhat vague as to the reason she hadn't died after all. She had "lost conscious" but the doctor had managed to pull her back from the brink of the grave.
"Though I've never been the same since. Di Blythe, what ARE you staring at? I don't believe you've been listening at all.”
"Oh, yes, I have," said Di guiltily. "I do think you've had the most wonderful life, Jenny. But look at the view.”
"The view? What's a view?”
"Why ... why ... something you're looking at. THAT ...” waving her hand at the panorama of meadow and woodland and cloud- smitten hill before them, with that sapphire dent of sea between the hills.
Jenny sniffed.
"Just a lot of old trees and cows. I've seen it a hundred times.
You're awful funny by spells, Di Blythe. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but sometimes I think you're not all there. I really do.
But I s'pose you can't help it. They say your ma is always raving like that. Well, there's our place.”
Di gazed at the Penny house and lived through her first shock of disillusionment. Was THIS the "mansion" Jenny had talked of? It was big enough, certainly, and had the five bay-windows; but it was wofully in need of painting and much of the "wooden lace" was missing. The verandah had sagged badly and the once lovely old fanlight over the front door was broken. The blinds were crooked, there were several brown-paper panes and the "beautiful birch grove" behind the house was represented by a few lean sinewy old trees. The barns were in a very tumbledown condition, the yard was full of old rusty machinery and the garden was a perfect jungle of weeds. Di had never seen such a looking place in her life and for the first time it occurred to her to wonder if ALL Jenny's tales were true. COULD anyone have so many narrow escapes of her life, even in nine years, as she had claimed to have?
Inside it was not much better. The parlour into which Jenny ushered her was musty and dusty. The ceiling was discoloured and covered with cracks. The famous marble mantelpiece was only painted ... even Di could see that ... and draped with a hideous Japanese scarf, held in place by a row of "moustache" cups.
The stringy lace curtains were a bad colour and full of holes. The blinds were of blue paper, much cracked and torn, with a huge basketful of roses depicted on them. As for the parlour being full of stuffed owls, there was a small glass case in one corner containing three rather dishevelled birds, one with its eyes missing entirely. To Di, accustomed to the beauty and dignity of Ingleside, the room looked like something you had seen in a bad dream. The odd thing, however, was that Jenny seemed quite unconscious of any discrepancy between her descriptions and reality. Di wondered if she had just dreamed that Jenny had told her such and such.