Anne and Diana’s First Visit to Echo Lodge

Anne Shirley and Diana Barry’s first visit to Echo Lodge begins as a wrong turn on the way to a social engagement and becomes an unexpected meeting of kindred imaginations. The detour brings the two girls to the home of Miss Lavendar Lewis, where an invented tea party, confessed loneliness, and a sudden question about Stephen Irving give their chance visit lasting emotional significance.

The Walk and the Fortunate Wrong Turn

In October, Diana Barry tells Anne Shirley that Ella Kimball has invited them to tea the next afternoon, where they are to meet Ella’s cousin, Irene Trent, who has come from town. The practical difficulty is transport: the horses will all be in use, and Anne’s pony is lame. Anne proposes walking through the woods instead, estimating the trip at no more than four miles and expecting that Oliver Kimball will drive them home. Diana agrees, and they set out by way of Lover’s Lane, crossing the farm to a road through beech and maple woods glowing with autumn color.

The difference in the girls’ priorities shapes the journey. Diana watches the time and urges them to hurry; Anne wants to absorb the beauty around her, even asking to walk quickly without having to talk. At a fork in the road, Anne takes the left turning rather than the right one they need. The narration connects the mistake to her absorption in the day, while Anne herself recognizes that they have gone wrong. They emerge onto a lonely grassy road in Middle Grafton, among ranks of spruce saplings, still several miles from the Kimball home.

The error does not lead them directly to their intended destination. Instead, as they continue through a dim, twisting lane beneath old firs, the enclosed landscape prompts Anne to imagine that they might be passing through an enchanted forest toward a palace. The house they find around the next turn is not a palace, but its difference from the province’s familiar wooden farmhouses makes it seem wonderfully out of place. Diana recognizes it as Echo Lodge, the home of Miss Lavendar Lewis, which she has heard about but never seen.

A House Like an Imagined Place

Echo Lodge’s appearance gives the girls’ arrival a setting that seems to answer Anne’s enchanted-forest fancy. It is a low-eaved house built of rough red Island sandstone, with a small peaked roof, two dormer windows beneath wooden hoods, and two large chimneys. Ivy covers the stone and has taken on bronze and wine-red autumn hues. Inside, a low-ceilinged room has small-paned windows with muslin curtains and old-fashioned furnishings, all kept with evident care. A table set with pale blue china, delicacies, and little golden ferns suggests a celebration waiting to begin.

The girls initially assume that Miss Lavendar must be expecting guests. Their expectations about the hostess are equally mistaken: anticipating the kind of angular, gray-haired spinster they associate with the role, they are astonished when she appears. Miss Lavendar is a small, carefully dressed woman with wavy white hair, a youthful face, soft brown eyes, and dimples. Her appearance, like the house, refuses the ordinary pattern the girls had brought with them. When she learns that they have lost their way, she gives them directions to West Grafton—but, after hesitating over the tea table, asks them to stay.

The Pretended Tea Party Becomes Real

Anne accepts promptly, though she first checks whether the girls would inconvenience their hostess, since the table seems set for other company. Miss Lavendar blushes and admits that no other guests are expected. She has been pretending to give a tea party because she is lonely and loves company, especially the right kind. She has cooked, decorated the table, set it with her mother’s wedding china, and dressed for an imagined gathering. Her companion, Charlotta the Fourth, has shared in this make-believe without betraying it.

The confession turns the apparent oddity of the tea party into the basis of a connection. Diana privately finds the game peculiar for a woman of Miss Lavendar’s age. Anne, by contrast, recognizes something familiar in it and responds with delighted surprise that Miss Lavendar also imagines things. That brief recognition changes the emotional balance of the encounter: the girls are no longer merely travelers who have stumbled upon an eccentric household. Miss Lavendar’s pretend guests have become real visitors, and she welcomes them to the tea she had prepared for company that existed only in imagination.

For Anne, imaginative play is not evidence that its practitioner has lost touch with reality. Miss Lavendar describes it as a private compensation, something she depends on at times, and takes comfort in being caught because the imagined occasion has come true in an unexpected way. Her admission also reveals how isolation has structured her daily life: Echo Lodge is far enough out of the way that few people visit. The scene holds both facts together. The tea party is playful and carefully prepared, but its origin is loneliness; the girls’ arrival does not erase that loneliness, yet it interrupts it with genuine companionship.

Stephen Irving and the Parting

As Anne and Diana prepare to leave, Anne puts an arm around Miss Lavendar and promises that they will return often. She compares their departure to a familiar phrase used by her pupil Paul Irving. The name immediately changes Miss Lavendar’s voice. She asks who Paul is and remarks that she had not thought anyone of that name lived in Avonlea. Anne then realizes that she has been heedless of Miss Lavendar’s old romance and explains that Paul is her young pupil, recently come from Boston to live with his grandmother, Mrs. Irving, on the shore road.

Miss Lavendar asks whether Paul is Stephen Irving’s son. Anne confirms it. Miss Lavendar does not pursue the answer openly; instead, she turns brightly to the lavender flowers she is giving the girls. She tells them that her mother loved lavender, that her mother planted the borders, and that her father named her for the flower. She also recounts how her father fell in love with her mother at first sight and remembered the lavender-scented sheets in the spare room where he slept on his first visit to her home. The intimate family story provides a gentle surface for the moment, while the question about Stephen has exposed a connection to a past she has not explained to the girls.

At the gate beneath the firs, Miss Lavendar suddenly looks tired and old; the brightness has faded from her face. When Anne and Diana look back, they see her sitting alone on a stone bench beneath a silver poplar, her head resting wearily on her hand. Diana says that she looks lonely and resolves that they must visit often. The first visit therefore ends not with the mystery of Miss Lavendar’s past resolved, but with a clearer sense of her present need for company. The detour has brought Anne and Diana to a new friend, and the name Paul Irving has opened an emotional question that their return visits may deepen.