I hate my red hair

Matthew, much to his own surprise, was enjoying himself. Like most quiet folks he liked talkative people when they were willing to do the talking themselves and did not expect him to keep up his end of it.

 

But he had never expected to enjoy the society of a little girl. Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse. He detested the way they had of    sidling    pat him timidily, with sidewise glance, as if they expected him to gobble them up at mouthful if they ventured to say a word. This was the Avonlea type of well-bred little girl. But this freckled witch wa very different, and although he found it rather difficult for his slower intelligence to keep up with her brisk mental processes he though that he "kind of liked her chatter." So he said as shyly as usual:

  "Oh, you can talk as much as you like. I don't mind."

                                                                       <Liu Yifei>

 

 "Oh, I'm so gald. I know you and I are going to get along together fine. It's such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should seen and not heard. I've had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?"

"Well now, that seems reasonable," said Matthew.

 

"Mrs. Spencer said that my tongue must be hung in the middle. But it isn't it's firmly fastened at once end. Mrs. Spencer said your place was named Green Gables. I asked her all about it. I was gladder than ever. I just love trees. And there weren't any at all abo them. They just looked like orphans themselves, those trees did. It used to make me want to cry to look at them. I used to say to them, 'Oh, you poor little things.! If you were out in a great big woods with other trees all round you and little mosses and Junebells growing over your roots and a brook not far away and birds singing in your branches, you could grow, couldn't you? But you can't where you are. I know hust exactly how you feel, little trees.' I felt sorry to leave them behind this morning.

 

 

 

You do get so attached to things like that, don't you? Is there a brook anywhere near Green Gables? I forgot to ask Mrs. Spencer that."

"Well now, yes, there's one right below the house."

"Fancy! It's always been one of my dreams to live near a brook. I never expected I would, though. Dreams don't often come true, do they? Wouldn't it be nice if they did? But just now I feel pretty neary perfectly happy. I can't feel exactly perfectly happy because- well, what color would you call this?"

 

 

  She twitched one of her long glossy braids over her thin shoulder and held it up before Matthew's eyes. Matthew was not used to diciding on the tints of ladies' tresses, but in this case there couldn't be much doubt.

 "It's red, ain't it?" he said.

 The girl let the braid drop back with a sigh that seemed to come from her very toes and to exhale forth all the sorrows of the ages.

 

 "Yes, it's red." she said resignedly. "Now you see why I can't be perfectly happy. Nobody could who had red hair. I don't mind the other things so much- the frdckles and the green eyes and my skinniness. I can imagine them away.

 I can imagine that I have a beautiful rose leaf complexion and lovely starry violet eyes.

But I cannot imagine that red hair away.

I do my best. I think to my self, 'Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven's wing.' But all the time I know it is just plain red, and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow. I read of a girl once in a novel who had a lifelong sorrow, but it wasn't red hair. Her hair was pure gold rippling back from her alabaster brow. What is an alabaster brow? I never could find out. Can you tell me?"

"Well now, I'm afraid I can't," said Matthew, who was getting a little dizzy.