Miss Lavendar Lewis and Stephen Irving’s engagement ended not through a loss of love but through a quarrel followed by mutual pride and missed chances to reconcile. Recalled by Miss Lavendar to Anne Shirley, the separation became the defining private history behind her unmarried life: she could describe herself as content, yet still remembered the heartbreak of believing Stephen would never return.

A Longstanding Engagement

Miss Lavendar says that she and Stephen had been engaged twenty-five years earlier and were to marry the following spring. Their attachment reached back to childhood. When Stephen was nine and Miss Lavendar six, he told her in the garden that he had nearly made up his mind to marry her when he grew up. She answered gravely, “Thank you”; afterward, she told her mother that his declaration had relieved her fear of having to be an old maid. In adulthood, she had a wedding dress made, a private fact known only to her mother and Stephen.

The Quarrel and Separation

The break began with what Miss Lavendar calls a foolish, ordinary quarrel, so commonplace that she could no longer remember how it started. She says Stephen began it, but also recognizes that she may have provoked him. She had been vain and coquettish, enjoyed teasing him, and knew he had rivals; Stephen, she recalls, was sensitive and high-strung. They parted in anger. Miss Lavendar expected the disagreement to pass, but Stephen returned before she had finished sulking. She would not listen to him or forgive him, and he left for good, too proud to come back again.

The separation then became self-perpetuating. Miss Lavendar sulked because Stephen did not return, yet could not bring herself to send for him or humble herself. In her account, both were proud, and pride combined with sulkiness turned a minor quarrel into a permanent parting. She does not present the breakup as proof that their affection had failed: she says she could never care for anyone else and would rather remain unmarried than marry a man who was not Stephen.

The Aftermath and Its Meaning

Miss Lavendar remembers the moment she understood that Stephen was not coming back as a genuine heartbreak. But she also resists presenting herself as eternally consumed by tragedy. She describes herself as happy and content, and explains that sorrow came in spells rather than ruling every day. Her account holds together the lasting consequence of the separation and the ordinary pleasures that continued afterward: memory and disappointment did not exclude dreams or enjoyment of life.

The episode’s force lies in its smallness. No grand betrayal or decisive incompatibility separates the couple; a quarrel whose beginnings are no longer clear is made irreversible by their refusal to yield. Told years later to Anne, Miss Lavendar’s recollection reveals how a brief failure to listen and forgive can shape a life, while her candid, gently humorous manner complicates the image of the abandoned woman as nothing but a tragic memory.