Miss Lavendar Lewis—Stephen Irving

Miss Lavendar Lewis—Stephen Irving is a youthful attachment that grew into an engagement and a planned marriage, then ended through an ordinary quarrel neither could undo. Lavendar’s recollection makes the separation consequential not because either stopped loving the other, but because pride and sulking kept them from repairing a breach they had both expected to be temporary. Their unfulfilled marriage shapes Lavendar’s unmarried life and re-enters the present when she learns about Stephen’s son, Paul Irving.

Childhood Attachment and Engagement

Lavendar traces their connection to childhood visits between their families. Stephen’s mother brought him to see Lavendar’s mother, and on his second visit, when he was nine and Lavendar six, he told her in the garden that he had nearly decided to marry her when they grew up. Lavendar remembered thanking him, then telling her mother that the prospect had relieved her fear of being an old maid. The episode gives their later engagement the quality of a promise that began before either could understand marriage as an adult commitment.

As Lavendar later tells Anne Shirley, they had been engaged in a sense for almost all their lives. Their formal plans were serious: they expected to marry the following spring, and Lavendar had already had a wedding dress made. Only her mother and Stephen knew about the dress. The private preparation underscores how near the relationship came to becoming a shared domestic future, even though the wedding never took place.

The Quarrel and Separation

The break began with what Lavendar calls a commonplace quarrel. Twenty-five years later, she cannot remember how it started and cannot confidently say which of them was more at fault. She recalls that Stephen began it, while also acknowledging that she may have provoked him. She describes herself at the time as vain and coquettish, sometimes teasing him; Stephen, in her account, was high-strung and sensitive. Their differences intensified a minor dispute, but neither the subject nor a single decisive offense survives in her memory.

They parted while both were angry. Lavendar expected the quarrel to be repaired, and believes it would have been if Stephen had not returned before she had finished sulking. When he came back, she would not listen to him or forgive him. He left for good, too proud to try again. Lavendar then sulked because he did not return, while her own pride prevented her from sending for him. The relationship ended through a sequence of missed chances: his return met with refusal, followed by her waiting for him to make another approach and his refusal to do so.

A Life Shaped by the Loss

Lavendar says she could never care for anyone else and did not want to. She would rather remain unmarried indefinitely than marry someone who was not Stephen. Her account therefore presents singlehood not as the result of an absence of opportunity alone, but as her conscious refusal to replace the attachment she had lost. The planned wedding dress and the future marriage had become, in retrospect, reminders of how little separated the couple from a different life—and how long the consequences of their quarrel lasted.

Yet Lavendar resists presenting herself as permanently consumed by grief. She says her heart broke when she understood Stephen was not coming back, but also describes herself as happy and content. In her view, heartbreak brings periods of pain rather than an uninterrupted tragic existence; ordinary pleasures and daily life continue between them. That account keeps the loss real without making it the whole of her identity. The relationship remains central to her history, but it has not prevented her from building a life she can call her own.

Stephen’s Son and the Past in the Present

The old attachment becomes newly immediate when Lavendar hears about Paul, Stephen’s son. She tells Anne that the news shocked her on the day she first heard it and that she had wanted to ask about him ever since. Her interest is tender and restrained: she wants to know what kind of boy he is and says she would like to see him. Learning that Paul is Anne’s pupil and a child Anne loves gives Lavendar a personal connection to Stephen’s present life, without changing the fact that their former engagement ended decades earlier.

Before Lavendar tells Anne the history, Anne and Diana Barry discuss the idea of a fairy-tale prince who might release Lavendar from a spell. Diana counters that Stephen may have come long ago and gone away again; Anne then warns her that the door is open. The contrast between the imagined prince and the actual history is telling: Stephen did come back, but Lavendar’s refusal to hear him, followed by their mutual pride, prevented the expected reconciliation. Lavendar’s account replaces romantic mystery with the ordinary, enduring consequences of a quarrel neither party managed to repair.