“It is not," Valency could hear her mother's prim, dictatorial voice asserting, "it is not MAIDENLY to think about MEN.”

“He had also the reputation of being a bit of a lady killer. But that probably accrued to him from his possession of a laughing, velvety voice which no girl could hear without a heartbeat, and a dangerous way of listening as if she were saying something that he had longed all his life to hear.”

“But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun-carpeted stairs that September noon - the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her - if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood - then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping and both were unafraid.”

“Next to a mother she wanted a quiet place where she could be alone when she wanted to be; to listen to the wind telling her strange tales, or hold the big spotted shell that murmured of the sea to her ear, or talk to the roses in the garden.”

“Gilbert put his arm about them. 'Oh, you mothers!' he said. 'You mothers! God knew what He was about when He made you.”

“Grandmother's voice was ice. "They do not. Your mother has been happy all these years, till you began stirring up old memories. Leave her alone. She is my daughter... no outsider shall ever come between us again... neither Andrew Stuart nor you nor anyone. And you will be good enough to remember that.”

“Anne looked at the white young mother with a certain awe that had never entered into her feelings for Diana before. Could this pale woman with the rapture in her eyes be the little black-curled, rosy-cheeked Diana she had played with in vanished schooldays? It gave her a queer desolate feeling that she herself somehow belonged only in those past years and had no business in the present at all.”