Lavendar Lewis's broken engagement and lifelong singlehood

Miss Lavendar Lewis’s broken engagement to Stephen Irving began with a small quarrel and hardened into a separation neither was able to undo. Twenty-five years later, she describes how pride and sulking turned a childhood attachment into a lasting loss, but also resists the idea that heartbreak must define her entire life. Her account holds two truths together: she loved Stephen and grieved his departure, yet built an independent, contented life without him.

The Story Before the Visit

Before Anne Shirley and Diana Barry first visit Miss Lavendar Lewis, Diana tells Anne that Miss Lavendar is forty-five, gray-haired, and once engaged to Stephen Irving, Paul Irving’s father. The engagement ended after the pair quarreled and parted. Anne interprets the story through fairy-tale convention: she imagines Miss Lavendar as a still-young princess under a spell, waiting for a prince who has not arrived. Diana’s account is plainer, suggesting that the prince may already have come and gone. That contrast sets up the more complicated history Miss Lavendar later tells Anne herself: the separation was real, but its cause was ordinary rather than enchanted or grandly tragic.

Miss Lavendar does not simply accept the identity of an unmarried woman as a sad fate. She says she decided to do things as well as possible and, since she had to remain unmarried, to become a particularly good example of one. She knows others consider her odd, but attributes this to following her own way instead of copying a conventional pattern. Her self-description makes her unmarried status part of a consciously shaped identity, not merely a role assigned to her by the broken engagement.

An Attachment Begun in Childhood

The engagement had roots in childhood. When Stephen was nine and Miss Lavendar was six, he told her in the garden that he had nearly decided to marry her when he grew up. She remembers answering politely and then telling her mother that she felt relieved: she no longer feared she would have to be an old maid. The recollection gives the relationship a playful beginning, but also shows how early the possibility of marriage became part of their shared story. Miss Lavendar says they were, in a sense, engaged for almost all their lives.

Twenty-five years before she tells Anne the story, they planned to marry the following spring. Miss Lavendar had even made her wedding dress, a private fact known only to her mother and Stephen. The dress marks how concrete their plans had become, while its secrecy underscores how little of this history was visible to others. By the time Anne hears it, the wedding that had once seemed imminent has become a life Miss Lavendar remembers as belonging to a distant past.

The Quarrel and the Separation

Miss Lavendar cannot remember exactly how the quarrel began. She calls it foolish and commonplace, and says she is unsure which of them was more to blame. Stephen started the dispute, she recalls, but she may have provoked him. She also acknowledges that she was vain and coquettish and liked to tease him; Stephen, in her account, was sensitive and quick to feel. They parted while both were angry. She expected matters to settle, but Stephen returned before she had finished sulking.

At that second opportunity, Miss Lavendar would not listen to Stephen or forgive him. He left for good, too proud to return. She then sulked because he did not come back, while recognizing that she might have sent for him herself. She could not bring herself to make that gesture, however, and describes them as equally proud. Her account locates the lasting break not in an exceptional betrayal but in a sequence of ordinary choices: anger, a refusal to reconcile, and the further refusal to initiate contact. The wedding dress and the childhood promise sharpen the contrast between how long the attachment had lasted and how simply it was lost.

Heartbreak and a Life of Her Own

Miss Lavendar says her heart broke when she understood Stephen was not coming back. Yet she rejects the idea that a broken heart must keep someone permanently miserable. She compares it to a bad tooth: it aches at intervals and may cost a night’s sleep, but between those spells a person can still enjoy life, dreams, echoes, and peanut candy. The comparison is deliberately ungrand. It answers Anne’s expectation of an unbroken tragic memory with a description of grief that recurs but does not occupy every moment.

She says she could never care for anyone else and did not want to marry anyone except Stephen, even if that meant remaining unmarried for a thousand years. At the same time, she calls herself happy and contented despite the loss. She notices that Anne seems disappointed to find her less continually miserable than the tragic figure Anne had imagined. For Miss Lavendar, real life repeatedly interrupts the performance of unhappiness by making room for comfort and pleasure. Her account does not deny the depth of her attachment; it distinguishes enduring love and regret from a life wholly ruled by suffering.

Stephen’s Son and the Past Reopened

The news that Stephen has a son gives Miss Lavendar a new, delicate connection to the life she lost. She tells Anne that learning of Paul Irving had shocked her and that she had wanted to ask about him. Anne describes Paul as a dear, sweet child who shares her and Miss Lavendar’s taste for make-believe. Miss Lavendar wonders whether he resembles the dream-boy she has imagined as her own, a private figure associated with the absent Stephen.

She wants to meet Paul, but asks Anne to wait a month. The prospect could bring pain as well as pleasure: Paul might look too much like Stephen, or not enough. When Anne and Paul visit later, Miss Lavendar turns pale at the sight of him, takes his hand, and says that he is very like his father. The meeting does not erase the separation or restore the lost engagement; it makes Stephen’s absence newly present through his son. Miss Lavendar’s hesitation, followed by her willingness to meet Paul, shows how her carefully contained past can still matter without reducing her to it.