chunk: Midway through their college years, Gilbert Blythe, who has always loved Anne, proposes to her but Anne rejects him; although she and Gilbert are very close, she holds sentimental fantasies about true love (all featuring a tall, dark, handsome, inscrutable hero) and does not recognize her true feelings for Gilbert. Gilbert leaves, his heart broken, and the two drift apart.
  Anne's childhood friend Ruby Gillis dies of consumption very soon after finding her own true love. Anne later welcomes the courtship of Roy Gardiner, a darkly handsome Redmond student who showers her with attention and poetic gestures. However, when he proposes after two years, Anne abruptly realizes that Roy does not really belong in her life, and that she had only been in love with the idea of him as the embodiment of her romantic image of love.