At the beginning of the novel, Anne and Gilbert, looking forward to a "splendid four years at Redmond" wander around to the Haunted Wood, to taste the "delicious apples" where "under tawny skin was white, white flesh, faintly veined with red; and besides their own proper apple taste, they had a certain wild, delightful tang". The Canadian scholar Elizabeth Waterson noted the "erotic" overtones to the scene of the apple tasting in the Haunted Wood, as sign of Anne's attraction to Gilbert of which she herself is not entirely aware. Anne's favorite hangout is Patty's Place, where she and her three best friends spent their evenings by a fireplace, three cats, two china dogs and a pot full of chrysanthemums that light up "through the golden gloom like creamy moons".