`` Anne , '' said Marilla abruptly , `` Miss Stacy was here this afternoon when you were out with Diana . '' Anne came back from her other world with a start and a sigh . `` Was she ? Oh , I 'm so sorry I was n't in . Why did n't you call me , Marilla ? Diana and I were only over in the Haunted Wood . It 's lovely in the woods now . All the little wood things -- the ferns and the satin leaves and the crackerberries -- have gone to sleep , just as if somebody had tucked them away until spring under a blanket of leaves . I think it was a little gray fairy with a rainbow scarf that came tiptoeing along the last moonlight night and did it . Diana would n't say much about that , though . Diana has never forgotten the scolding her mother gave her about imagining ghosts into the Haunted Wood . It had a very bad effect on Diana 's imagination . It blighted it . Mrs. Lynde says Myrtle Bell is a blighted being . I asked Ruby Gillis why Myrtle was blighted , and Ruby said she guessed it was because her young man had gone back on her . Ruby Gillis thinks of nothing but young men , and the older she gets the worse she is . Young men are all very well in their place , but it does n't do to drag them into everything , does it ? Diana and I are thinking seriously of promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old maids and live together forever . Diana has n't quite made up her mind though , because she thinks perhaps it would be nobler to marry some wild , dashing , wicked young man and reform him . Diana and I talk a great deal about serious subjects now , you know .
We feel that we are so much older than we used XXXXX be that it is n't becoming to talk of childish matters .
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