The planned visit of Charlotte E. Morgan to Green Gables becomes the occasion for Anne Shirley’s painstaking preparations and a cascade of domestic mishaps. The hoped-for meeting never takes place: while Anne and her guests cope with ruined pies and a shattered borrowed platter, Morgan is confined to her room by a severe ankle sprain. The episode sets the brightness of anticipation against the awkward comedy of accidents, then gives Anne’s disappointment a final, quieter turn through a letter from Priscilla Grant.

The Expected Visit and Its Stakes

Anne learns from a letter that Charlotte E. Morgan is on Prince Edward Island and may drive to Avonlea on Thursday if the weather is fine. Morgan plans to spend the afternoon at Green Gables and then go to the hotel at White Sands, where some of her American friends are staying. To Anne, this is extraordinary: Morgan is famous, and Anne knows her as the author of The Rosebud Garden. She is so excited that the prospect seems almost dreamlike.

Marilla Cuthbert answers the news with characteristic restraint. She observes that Morgan is probably much like other people, though she admits that the visit is no commonplace occurrence. Her practical question is whether the guests will arrive in time for dinner. Anne wants to make the meal herself, not to display social elegance but to offer something in welcome to an author whose work she admires. Marilla grants her request while warning her not to attempt too much style.

Anne accepts that caution in principle: she wants the dinner to be as nice and dainty as possible, not an occasion for pretending the household has things it does not usually have. Her menu begins with cream-of-onion soup and includes two roast fowls. They are the white roosters she has loved since they were little balls of yellow down hatched by the gray hen. Anne acknowledges that the birds will eventually have to be sacrificed, but cannot bring herself to kill them for the dinner; she plans to ask John Henry Carter to do it. Davy Keith, by contrast, volunteers to wield the axe, relishing the prospect of seeing the headless birds hop. Even before the guests arrive, the preparations combine Anne’s tenderness with the children’s unfiltered practicality.

Mishaps in the Kitchen and Hall

The dinner preparations produce a first disaster when Davy’s attempt to put away a ball of twine ends with him sprawled on two lemon pies. He has finished ravelling out his herring net and wound the twine into a ball, adding it to the many similar balls he keeps on a pantry shelf, apparently for the pleasure of owning them. Reaching that shelf requires climbing onto the table and leaning at a dangerous angle, something Marilla had expressly forbidden after an earlier mishap. Davy slips, ruins his clean blouse, and crushes both pies. The pig eventually benefits from the accident, but the planned meal loses two of its carefully prepared dishes.

A second accident threatens the borrowed platter. Anne had asked its owner, Miss Barry of Charlottetown, to lend it for the Aid bazaar. The platter had cost twenty dollars, and after serving its purpose at the bazaar Anne had taken responsibility for bringing it back to Green Gables rather than trusting anyone else with it. When Anne carries it to the front door for her guests to admire, a crash from the pantry draws her, Marilla, and Diana Barry away. Anne sets the platter down hastily on the second stair as she rushes to investigate.

The pantry scene reveals the damage to the lemon pies and Davy’s yellow-filling-smeared blouse. Later, with dinner over, another heavy object bounds down the stairs and smashes at the bottom. The object is a large pink conch shell; among its fragments lie the pieces of Miss Barry’s platter. Davy is at the top of the stairs, kneeling and staring at the wreckage, but the account does not establish exactly how the shell came to fall. Marilla asks whether he threw it on purpose. Anne instead takes responsibility, explaining that she left the platter on the stairs and forgot it was there. She regards the breakage as deserved punishment for her own carelessness and immediately fears what the owner will say. Diana tries to soften the blow by noting that the platter was bought rather than inherited.

A Dinner Without Its Expected Guest

The visitors make an effort to keep the meal from collapsing socially. Mr. Allan, Mrs. Allan, and Miss Stacy help sustain the occasion, while Marilla remains composed. Anne and Diana, however, are too disappointed and spent by the excitement of the morning to talk or eat freely. Anne makes a determined effort to contribute to the conversation for the guests’ sake, but her usual animation has disappeared. She longs for the house to be quiet so she can retreat to the east gable and recover from the day.

The dinner’s troubles are therefore not just a matter of missing pies or broken crockery. Anne has prepared it as a personal expression of admiration and welcome, and the anticipated meeting with Morgan gives the meal its special meaning. Instead, the people who actually sit down to dinner must negotiate a strained, subdued gathering. When the platter breaks after the meal, Anne’s responsibility for having set it down adds a further, concrete failure to an occasion already drained of its excitement. The guests soon leave, tactfully sensing that their departure is best; Anne and Diana wash the dishes in unusual silence, and Diana goes home with a headache.

The Letter and Anne’s Disappointment

Anne withdraws to the east gable with a headache of her own and remains there until Marilla returns from the post office at sunset with a letter Priscilla had written the previous day. The letter explains that Morgan has badly sprained her ankle and cannot leave her room. Priscilla fears that the visit to Green Gables will have to be abandoned altogether: by the time Morgan’s ankle is well, she will need to return to Toronto by a set date. The earlier mishaps have not caused the cancellation; they have taken place during the preparations for a visit that was already made impossible by Morgan’s injury.

Anne sits on the red sandstone step of the back porch as twilight falls and admits that the news is a bitter disappointment. She recognizes that she had partly expected the visit to prove too good to be true, but resists turning that thought into a general judgment about her prospects. She reminds herself that good things, and better ones, have continued to come true for her. She can also imagine that she and Diana may someday laugh about the day’s accidents, while acknowledging that she cannot yet find them funny.

Marilla offers a more practical consolation: Anne will encounter many disappointments in life, and her habit of setting her heart intensely on an outcome can make its failure especially painful. That response leaves the episode with a contrast rather than a neat resolution. Anne’s hopes have been frustrated, yet the failed visit does not cancel her faith that other good things lie ahead. The broken platter and ruined pies make disappointment material and immediate; the final letter gives it a cause beyond the household’s control, while Anne’s own reflection keeps one ruined day from becoming a verdict on the future.