The Blue Castle. L.M. Montgomery

It was hard to go there at any time and not find some canoodling couple — or young girls in pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly talking over their little secrets. Valancy didn’t know which made her feel more self-conscious and uncomfortable.

      This evening she encountered both. She met Connie Hale and Kate Bayley, in new pink organdy dresses with flowers stuck coquettishly in their glossy, bare hair. Valancy had never had a pink dress or worn flowers in her hair. Then she passed a young couple she didn’t know, dandering along, oblivious to everything but themselves. The young man’s arm was around the girl’s waist quite shamelessly. Valancy had never walked with a man’s arm about her. She felt that she ought to be shocked — they might leave that sort of thing for the screening twilight, at least — but she wasn’t shocked. In another flash of desperate, stark honesty she owned to herself that she was merely envious. When she passed them she felt quite sure they were laughing at her — pitying her — “there’s that queer little old maid, Valancy Stirling. They say she never had a beau in her whole life” — Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover’s Lane. Never had she felt so utterly colourless, skinny and insignificant.

      Just where Lover’s Lane debouched on the street, an old car was parked. Valancy knew that car well — by sound, at least — and everybody in Deerwood knew it. This was before the phrase “tin Lizzie” had come into circulation — in Deerwood, at least; but if it had been known, this car was the tinniest of Lizzies — though it was not a Ford but an old Grey Slosson. Nothing more battered and disreputable could be imagined.

      It was Barney Snaith’s car and Barney himself was just scrambling up from under it, in overalls plastered with mud. Valancy gave him a swift, furtive look as she hurried by. This was only the second time she had ever seen the notorious Barney Snaith, though she had heard enough about him in the five years that he had been living up back in Muskoka. The first time had been nearly a year ago, on the Muskoka road. He had been crawling out from under his car then, too, and he had given her a cheerful grin as she went by — a little, whimsical grin that gave him the look of an amused gnome. He didn’t look bad — she didn’t believe he was bad, in spite of the wild yarns that were always being told of him. Of course he went tearing in that terrible old Grey Slosson through Deerwood at hours when all decent people were in bed — often with old “Roaring Abel,” who made the night hideous with his howls — “both of them dead drunk, my dear.” And everyone knew that he was an escaped convict and a defaulting bank clerk, a murderer in hiding and an infidel, an illegitimate son of old Roaring Abel Gay and the father of Roaring Abel’s illegitimate grandchild. A counterfeiter and a forger and a few other awful things. But still Valancy didn’t believe he was bad. Nobody with a smile like that could be bad, no matter what he had done.

      It was that night the Prince of the Blue Castle changed from a being of grim jaw and hair with a dash of premature grey, to a rakish individual with overlong, tawny hair, dashed with red, dark-brown eyes, and ears that stuck out just enough to give him an alert look but not enough to be called flying jibs. But he still retained something a little grim about the jaw.

      Barney Snaith looked even more disreputable than usual just now. It was very evident that he hadn’t shaved for days, and his hands and arms, bare to the shoulders, were black with grease. But he was whistling gleefully to himself and he seemed so happy that Valancy envied him. She envied him his lightheartedness and his irresponsibility and his mysterious little cabin up on an island in Lake Mistawis — even his rackety old Grey Slosson. Neither he nor his car had to be respectable and live up to traditions. When he rattled past her a few minutes later, bareheaded, leaning back in his Lizzie at a raffish angle, his longish hair blowing in the wind, a villainous-looking old black pipe in his mouth, she envied him again. Men had the best of it, no doubt about that. This outlaw was happy, whatever he was or wasn’t. She, Valancy Stirling, respectable, well-behaved to the last degree, was unhappy and had always been unhappy. So there you were.

      Valancy was just in time for supper. The sun had clouded over, and a dismal, drizzling rain was falling again. Cousin Stickles had the neuralgia. Valancy had to do the family darning and there was no time for Magic of Wings.

      “Can’t the darning wait till tomorrow?” she pleaded.

      “Tomorrow will bring its own duties,” said Mrs. Frederick inexorably.