Magic for Marigold by L. M. Montgomery Page B

sometimes. After Marigold had gone into the spare room one day and tried on the hats of several guests, there was a council in the orchard room that evening. Mother and Young Grandmother were horrified. But Old Grandmother would not allow Marigold to be punished.
    â€œI did that myself once,” she said. “But I wasn’t found out,” she whispered to Marigold with a chuckle. She chuckled again on the day when Young Grandmother had asked Marigold a foolish, unanswerable question. “Why are you so bad?” But Marigold had answered it—sulkily. “It’s more int’resting than being good.”
    Old Grandmother called her back as she was following outraged Young Grandmother out of the room, and put a tiny blue-veined hand on her shoulder.
    â€œIt may be more interesting,” she whispered, “but you can’t keep it up because you’re a Lesley. The Lesleys never could be bad with any comfort to themselves. Too much conscience. No use making yourself miserable just for the sake of being bad.”
    Marigold always went into the orchard room on Sunday mornings to recite her golden text and catechism questions to Old Grandmother. Woe betide her if she missed a word. And in her nervousness she always did miss, no matter how perfectly she could say them before she went in. And she always was sent in there to take pills. Nobody at Cloud of Spruce could make Marigold take pills except Old Grandmother. She had no trouble. “Don’t screw up your face like that. I hate ugly children. Open your mouth.” Marigold opened it. “Pop it in.” Popped in it was. “Swallow it.” It was swallowed—somehow. And then Old Grandmother would put her hand somewhere about the bed and produce a handful of big fat juicy blue raisins.
    For she was not always unamiable. And sometimes she showed Marigold the big family Bible—a sort of Golden Book where all the clan names were written, and where all sorts of yellowed old clippings were kept. And sometimes she told her stories about the brides on the walls and the hair wreaths where the brown and gold and black locks of innumerable dead and gone Lesleys bloomed in weird, unfading buds and blossoms.
    Old Grandmother was always saying things, too—queer, odd speeches with a tang in them Marigold somehow liked. They generally shocked Young Grandmother and Mother, but Marigold remembered and pondered over them though she seldom understood them fully. They did not seem related to anything in her small experience. In after life they were to come back to her. In many a crisis some speech of Old Grandmother’s suddenly popped into mind and saved her from making a mistake.
    But on the whole Marigold always breathed a sigh of relief when the door of the orchard room closed behind her.
    6
    Marigold at six had already experienced most of the passions that make life vivid and dreadful and wonderful—none the less vivid and dreadful at six than at sixteen or sixty. Probably she was born knowing that you were born to the purple if you were a Lesley. But pride of race blossomed to full stature in her the day she talked with little May Kemp from the Hollow.
    â€œDo you wash your face every day?” asked May incredulously.
    â€œYes,” said Marigold.
    â€œWhether it needs it or not?”
    â€œOf course. Don’t you?”
    â€œNot me,” said May contemptuously. “I just wash mine when it’s dirty.”
    Then Marigold realized the difference between the Lesley caste and outsiders as all Young Grandmother’s homilies had not been able to make her.
    Shame? Oh, she had known it to the full—drunk its cup to the dregs. Would she ever forget that terrible supper-table when she had slipped, red and breathless, into her seat, apologizing for being late? An inexcusable thing when there were company to tea—two ministers and two ministers’ wives.
    â€œI couldn’t help it, Mother. I went