The year I spent at Queen’s was the first year I lived in a town, and I have never been so homesick or so happy at the same time.
We went in to Charlottetown to study for our teachers’ licences. I had a narrow room in a boarding house with a view of a brick wall, and I wrote home more letters than Marilla could possibly have wanted, and every week the town seemed a little less like a foreign country. The streets were paved in places. There were shop windows with more hats in them than Avonlea had heads.
I did the work of two years in one, because I had decided to. Gilbert Blythe was doing the same, and I would have walked into the harbour sooner than let him finish ahead of me. We had not spoken, beyond what politeness required, for five years. I will not tell here why. It was a very small matter, and I made it very large, and I was wrong.
At the end of the year there were two prizes. Gilbert won the medal. I won the Avery — two hundred and fifty dollars a year for four years, for the best mark in English, to be spent at Redmond College. When the list was posted, the first thing I thought of was not Redmond at all. It was Matthew’s face when I told him.
