For once in her life Gertie Pye made all the sensation she desired.  If she had thrown a bomb among the complacent Improvers she could hardly have made more.

“It can’t be true,” said Anne blankly.

“That’s just what I said when I heard it first, don’t you know,” said Gertie, who was enjoying herself hugely. “I said it couldn’t be true . . . that Judson Parker wouldn’t have the heart to do it, don’t you know.  But father met him this afternoon and asked him about it and he said it was true.  Just fancy!  His farm is side-on to the Newbridge road and how perfectly awful it will look to see advertisements of pills and plasters all along it, don’t you know?”

The Improvers did know, all too well.  Even the least imaginative among them could picture the grotesque effect of half a mile of board fence adorned with such advertisements.  All thought of church and school grounds vanished before this new danger.  Parliamentary rules and regulations were forgotten, and Anne, in despair, gave up trying to keep minutes at all.  Everybody talked at once and fearful was the hubbub.

“Oh, let us keep calm,” implored Anne, who was the most excited of them all, “and try to think of some way of preventing him.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to prevent him,” exclaimed Jane bitterly.  “Everybody knows what Judson Parker is.  He’d do anything for money.  He hasn’t a Spark of public spirit or any sense of the beautiful.”

The prospect looked rather unpromising.  Judson Parker and his sister were the only Parkers in Avonlea, so that no leverage could be exerted by family connections.  Martha Parker was a lady of all too certain age who disapproved of young people in general and the Improvers in particular.  Judson was a jovial, smooth-spoken man, so uniformly goodnatured and bland that it was surprising how few friends he had.  Perhaps he had got the better in too many business transactions. . . which seldom makes for popularity.  He was reputed to be very “sharp” and it was the general opinion that he “hadn’t much principle.”

“If Judson Parker has a chance to ‘turn an honest penny,’ as he says himself, he’ll never lose it,” declared Fred Wright.

“Is there nobody who has any influence over him?” asked Anne despairingly.

“He goes to see Louisa Spencer at White Sands,” suggested Carrie Sloane.  “Perhaps she could coax him not to rent his fences.”

“Not she,” said Gilbert emphatically.  “I know Louisa Spencer well.  She doesn’t ‘believe’ in Village Improvement Societies, but she does believe in dollars and cents.  She’d be more likely to urge Judson on than to dissuade him.”

“The only thing to do is to appoint a committee to wait on him and protest,” said Julia Bell, “and you must send girls, for he’d hardly be civil to boys . . . but I won’t go, so nobody need nominate me.”