"La belle qui veut,
La belle qui n'ose,
Cueillir les roses
Du jardin bleu."
Some characters evolve slowly, by imperceptible gradations, as a rose opens or a bird puts on its feathers. But Nancy broke through her chrysalis-shell in an hour. From one day to the next the gentle, submissive Nancy was no more; the passive, childlike soul clothed in the simplicity of genius died that night—for no other reason but that her hour had come—drifted off, perhaps, in the little dreamboat of her childhood, where Baby Bunting sat at the helm waiting for her. And together they went back, afloat on the darkness, to the Isle of What is No More.
"Dear Unknown,
"You are very persistent. Is it not enough to know who I am not, that you needs must want to know who I am? What's in a name? A woman by any other name would be as false.
"Then call me, if call me you will, by the sweeping, impersonal, fragile name of Eve. And picture me as Eve, with the serpent coiled round her neck like a boa, and the after-glimmer of a lost Paradise in her tranquil eyes. The tranquil eyes are blue, under dark hair.
"What! more questions? Yes, I am young—not disconcertingly so. And good-tempered—not monotonously so. And almost pretty—not distractingly so.
"And I write to you, not because I am temerarious, but because the month is April and the time is twilight. And you are the Unknown."
The Unknown answered. And she wrote to him again. She put all her fancies and all her phrases into the letters. She wrote him lies and truth. She described herself to him as she thought she was not—but as perhaps she really was. In her letters she was a spoilt butterfly, whirling through life with vivid wings.
As she wrote she grew to resemble the girl she wrote about. She borrowed money from Peggy and from George, who had fallen in love with her. She would pay it back some day. She bought clothes, and ran up debts, and signed notes, and resorted to expedients. All the cleverness that should have gone into her book she used in her everyday life to wrench herself free from the poverty that was choking her. "Nothing matters! Nothing matters!" Only to get out of the mire and the mud—to lift little Anne-Marie out of the hideous surroundings, to stand her up safe and high in the light, out of reach of the sordid struggle.