Friendship and loyalty

Friendship and loyalty in the novel are shown less as unchanging closeness than as a willingness to remain attentive as circumstances alter. Anne and Diana confront the prospect of separation, Philippa Gordon turns her social standing into a welcome for Anne and Priscilla, and Anne listens to Ruby Gillis as illness makes old quarrels and misunderstandings newly urgent. Across these different ties, loyalty means making room for another person’s feelings, history, and changing needs.

Friendship Across Separation

As Anne prepares to leave for college, Diana repeatedly mourns that Anne is going the following week. Anne does not dismiss her friend’s sadness, but gently resists allowing the coming departure to consume the days they still have together. She points out that Diana will remain among old friends and Fred, while she herself expects to be among strangers, knowing no one. Her reply gives their separation two emotional perspectives: Diana will miss Anne, but Anne, too, is leaving home and familiar relationships behind.

The exchange makes their affection visible through candor rather than solemn declaration. Diana’s worry returns, and Anne answers with cheerfulness and teasing, not by pretending that leaving will be easy. When Diana mentions Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane as exceptions to Anne’s expectation of being alone, Anne sarcastically treats Charlie as a great comfort, and the two laugh. The joke reflects their familiarity: Diana knows Anne’s opinion of Charlie, even while she does not know exactly what Anne feels about Gilbert. Their friendship includes this shared ease and private knowledge, but also a limit to what even close friends can know. Anne herself has not yet understood her feelings for Gilbert.

Anne’s response to Diana also expresses a practical form of loyalty: she asks her friend not to let the future take away the happiness of the present. The impending move does not erase their bond; it changes the conditions under which they will have to sustain it. In this scene, friendship makes room for both grief at separation and enjoyment of the time that remains.

Making Room at Redmond

At Redmond, Philippa Gordon helps Anne and Priscilla enter a social world that might otherwise have remained difficult to reach. Philippa’s beauty, charm, wealth, and family connections open doors to cliques, clubs, and classes. She brings her friends with her, making her own access useful to them rather than guarding it as a private advantage. The other first-year women, who lack her sponsorship, remain more on the fringe during their first college year. The contrast presents loyalty not only as a feeling but as an action with social consequences.

Philippa’s generosity is striking because she is popular and constantly surrounded by admirers. She enjoys recounting her many romantic conquests to Anne and Priscilla, yet her delight in attention does not displace her attachment to them. She especially adores Anne, whose seriousness makes Philippa aware of qualities she wishes she possessed: wisdom, strength, and the capacity to become better. Philippa describes this self-consciousness openly, even though she also admits that the next attractive young man can undo her resolutions. Her friendship with Anne therefore includes admiration and vulnerability, not merely shared amusement.

Anne and Priscilla, for their part, continue to find Philippa lovable and entertaining even as they recognize her frivolity. Anne responds to Philippa’s request for reassurance with affectionate teasing, calling her a kitten while wondering when she finds time to study. Beneath the joke is a direct confirmation of affection. Philippa’s wish to hear that Anne likes her and Anne’s willingness to say so show that loyalty can include the simple work of reassurance. The friendship also persists alongside academic differences: Philippa holds her own in her classes, while Anne excels far ahead of her in English.

Old Ties and New Understanding

Anne’s relationship with Ruby is shaped by a schoolgirl intimacy that has weakened through the years but has not disappeared. When Anne hears that Ruby is dying, the news shocks her precisely because the image of Ruby as brilliant, merry, and coquettish seems incompatible with death. Their lives have grown apart, yet the older bond still gives the news its force. Ruby had greeted Anne warmly after church and invited her to visit, eager to hear about Anne’s life at Redmond and to talk about her own recent flirtations. Anne promises to go; Diana offers to accompany her.

During their conversation, Ruby looks back on her long friendship with Em White. They had been close schoolmates for three years before a quarrel at a school concert ended their communication. Each assumed the other would refuse to speak first, and so both let the separation last for years. They have only just made up. Ruby now sees the quarrel as foolish, not because the original hurt never mattered, but because time has made the cost of their silence plain. Her account turns friendship into a lesson about how affection can be obscured by mutual misreading.

Anne answers that misunderstanding causes much of life’s trouble. She does not try to make Ruby’s situation disappear; she listens, promises to return, and offers help. Ruby tells her that Anne has already helped and that things no longer seem quite so dreadful. The exchange gives companionship a concrete role: Anne’s presence cannot undo Ruby’s illness, but it can ease Ruby’s distress and make it possible for her to speak honestly about fear, regret, and reconciliation.

Loyalty as Care and Change

These relationships offer different measures of loyalty. Diana and Anne’s bond is tested by departure; Philippa’s generosity makes friendship a means of inclusion; Ruby’s meeting with Anne joins affection to the urgency of limited time. None requires friendship to mean perfect knowledge or uninterrupted closeness. Diana does not know Anne’s unrecognized feelings for Gilbert, Anne and Ruby have grown apart, and Em and Ruby allowed a mistaken assumption to prolong a quarrel. What endures is not an absence of distance or misunderstanding, but the possibility of responding with warmth when a friend becomes present again.

Ruby’s conversation has a further consequence for Anne. Walking home slowly afterward, Anne feels that the evening has changed her understanding of life and given it a deeper purpose. Ruby’s fear of what lies beyond death prompts Anne to consider how a life should be lived before that point arrives. The episode therefore links loyalty to attention: by hearing Ruby’s experience, Anne is brought to reflect on her own aims. Friendship here does not serve only the person who receives comfort. It can also alter the listener’s sense of what matters.

Narrative Significance

The novel places these friendships beside moments of transition: Anne’s departure from home, the formation of a college social circle, and Ruby’s serious illness. That arrangement distinguishes several kinds of change without treating affection as something that must remain unchanged to remain real. Anne can leave Diana while still valuing their remaining days; Philippa can belong to a lively, expanding social world while making her friends part of it; and Anne can return to an old school friendship with a more serious understanding of what a visit may mean.

The episodes also move from lightness toward gravity without abandoning the ordinary signs of intimacy. A teasing exchange, access to a circle of acquaintances, the reassurance that one is liked, and the chance to speak about an old quarrel all carry different emotional weight. Together, they make friendship and loyalty a continuing practice: remembering the bond, welcoming the other person, and giving attention to what that person needs now.