It had never worried me in the least that I wasn’t married, although everybody in Avonlea pitied old maids; but it did worry me, and I frankly confess it, that I had never had a chance to be. Even Nancy, my old nurse and servant, knew that, and pitied me for it. Nancy is an old maid herself, but she has had two proposals. She did not accept either of them because one was a widower with seven children, and the other a very shiftless, good-for-nothing fellow; but, if anybody twitted Nancy on her single condition, she could point triumphantly to those two as evidence that “she could an she would.” If I had not lived all my life in Avonlea I might have had the benefit of the doubt; but I had, and everybody knew everything about me — or thought they did.
I had really often wondered why nobody had ever fallen in love with me. I was not at all homely; indeed, years ago, George Adoniram Maybrick had written a poem addressed to me, in which he praised
my beauty quite extravagantly ; that didn’t mean any-
