“Fever?” she mumbled. “A person has got to be already dead in his coffin before you’d lift a finger to help.” She sped from the office into the dreary reception-hall.
On her way out her eye was caught by the black-faced type on the cover of a magazine that lay on the centre-table.
SHORT-STORY COMPETITION
A Five-Hundred-Dollar Prize for the Best Love-Story of a Working-Girl
As she read the magical words, the colour rushed to her cheeks. Forgotten was the humiliation of the superintendent’s refusal to take her in, forgotten were the cold, the hunger. Her whole being leaped at the words:
“Write your own love-story, but if you have never lived love, let it be your dream of love.”
“Your dream of love.” The words were as wine in her blood. Was there ever a girl who hungered and dreamed of love as she? It was as though in the depths of her poverty and want the fates had challenged her to give substance to her dreams. She stumbled out of the huge building, her feet in the snow, her mind in the clouds.
“God from the world! the gas is burning again!” cried Hanneh Breineh as she groped her way back into her cellar-room. “The children are dancing over the fire like for a holiday. All day they had nothing to warm in their bellies, and the coffee tastes like wine from heaven.”
“Wine from heaven!” repeated the girl. “What wine but love from heaven?” and she clutched the magazine more tightly to her shrunken chest.
In the flicker of the gas-jet the photograph on the wall greeted her like a living thing. With the feel of the steady gaze upon her, she re-read the message that was to her an invitation and a challenge; and as she read, the dingy little room became alive with light. The understanding eyes seemed to pour vision into her soul. What was the purpose of all the harsh experiences that had been hers till now but to make her see just this, that love, and love only, was the one vital force of life? What was the purpose of all the privation and want she had endured but to make her see more poignantly this ethereal essence of love? The walls of her little room dissolved. The longing for love that lay dumb within her all her years took shape in human form. More real than life, closer than the beat within her heart, was this radiant, all-consuming vision that possessed her.