PennyDaisy

::Edited::

Why can’t all fictitious heros be like Gilbert?

“What are you thinking of,
Anne?” asked Gilbert, coming down the walk. He had left his horse and
buggy out at the road.

“Of Miss Lavender and Mr.
Irving,” answered Anne dreamily. “Isn’t it beautiful to think how
everything has turned out. . .how they have come together again after all the
years of separation and misunderstanding?”

“Yes, it’s
beautiful,” said Gilbert, looking steadily down into Anne’s uplifted face,
“but wouldn’t it have been more beautiful still, Anne, if there had been no
separation or misunderstanding. . . if they had come hand in hand all the way
through life, with no memories behind them but those which belonged to each
other?”

….

He had made up his mind,
also, that his future must be worthy of its goddess. Even in quiet Avonlea
there were temptations to be met and faced. White Sands youth were a rather
“fast” set, and Gilbert was popular wherever he went. But he meant to
keep himself worthy of Anne’s friendship and perhaps some distant day her love;
and he watched over word and thought and deed as jealously as if her clear eyes
were to pass in judgment on it. She held over him the unconscious influence
that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an
influence which would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and
which she would as certainly lose if she were ever false to them. In Gilbert’s
eyes Anne’s greatest charm was the fact that she never stooped to the petty
practices of so many of the Avonlea girls — the small jealousies, the little
deceits and rivalries, the palpable bids for favor. Anne held herself apart
from all this, not consciously or of design, but simply because anything of the
sort was utterly foreign to her transparent, impulsive nature, crystal clear in
its motives and aspirations.