`` No , '' he said , `` I did n't ; but , '' he added , gravely and deliberately , `` I do n't think you should have asked me such a question . '' It was old Abel 's turn to blush . Carmody people would not have believed he could blush ; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed child of the rebuking face . `` No , I guess I should n't , '' he said . `` But I 'm always making mistakes . I 've never made anything else . That 's why I 'm nothing more than ` Old Abel ' to the Carmody people . Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me ` Mr. Blair . ' Yet William Blair at the store up there , rich and respected as he is , was n't half as clever a man as I was when we started in life : you may n't believe that , but it 's true . And the worst of it is , young Felix , that most of the time I do n't care whether I 'm Mr. Blair of old Abel . Only when you play I care . It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl 's eyes some years ago made me feel . Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea . We got into a conversation at Blair 's store . She could talk a blue streak to anyone , that girl could . I happened to say about something that it did n't matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me . She looked at me with her big , innocent eyes , a little reproachful like , as if I 'd said something awful heretical . ` Do n't you think , Mr. Blair , ' she says , ` that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us ? ' -- as grave as if she 'd been a hundred instead of eleven . ` Things matter SO much to me now , ' she says , clasping her hands thisaway , ` and I 'm sure that when I 'm sixty they 'll matter just five times as much to me . '
Well , the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed XXXXX myself because things had stopped mattering with me .
ago as in into like of than to up with