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, wasn't half as clever a man as I was
when we started in life: you mayn't believe that, but it's true.
And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don'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 didn'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.
'Don'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 of myself because things had stopped mattering with me.
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