"When I am asked, 'Is Anne real?'"

"When I am asked if Anne herself is a "real person" I always answer "no" with an odd reluctance and uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real tome that I feel i am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save Dreamland. Does she not stand at my elbow even now--if I turned my head quickly should I not see her--with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of red-hair and her little pointed chin? To tell that haunting elf that she is not real, because, forsooth, I never met her in the flesh! No, I cannot do it! She is so real that, although I've never met her, i feel quite sure I shall do so some day--perhaps in a stroll through Lover's Lane in the twilight--or in the moonlit Birch Path--I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere." The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 39, Rubio & Waterston

Though this entry was written before her marriage to Ewan in June of the same year, Maud's manner in speaking of Anne causes me to jump ahead into the long future that was to be her life with her husband. It occurs to me that Ewan, being an extremely short sighted human being, probably never had the slightest idea of whom he was married to-- beyond the fact that Maud was famous and provided money for his comfort.  This passage gives rise to an image that Anne, in reality, was never very far from Maud;  so, with tongue in cheek, I wonder if Ewan ever had the slightest idea that an extra person was living in their house? Knowing the probable answer to this question gives rise to another idea, of how lonely and unknown Maud must have felt in her marriage to Ewan.

Maud always maintained throughout her life that she was "fond" of Ewan and that she "liked" him.  Her long suffering devotion, for whatever reason,  is a reflection of her own honour.