Aurora the Magnificent

by Gertrude Hall Brownell

This she was intending when the sound of the door-bell at once stopped and cheered her by the possibility it held out of some diversion. Vitale entered with a package.

Catching in what he said the name Gaetano, Aurora took it to mean that Gaetano had brought the package. He was waiting below, she did not doubt. Gaetano was Giovanna’s nephew, and had more than once come on errands from Gerald. Saying, “Aspettare!” she hastened into her room for the porte-monnaie which resided in her top drawer. From this she drew a reward that should make 227the journey through night and rain from Gerald’s house to hers seem no hardship. Her blues had vanished.

Before removing the rain-splashed newspaper, she gazed for a moment at the package, trying to guess what it could be. It was square, flat, about a foot and a half one way by a foot the other. What was Gerald Fane sending her like that without any enlightening missive? A note might be inside. She cut the string, took off the newspaper, to find a second wrapper of clean white drawing-paper. After touching and pinching, she guessed the object to be a picture-frame and picture. Filled with curiosity, she pulled off the last wrapping, and with a face at first very blank stared before her....

It was a painting, one of the kind she had seen at Gerald’s studio and not liked.

Different though it was from the portrait down-stairs,–as different as poverty from riches, as twilight from day,–she could yet see that this also was meant for a portrait of herself. She remembered tying that blue neckerchief over her head and under her chin one evening, trying to look like an Italian in her pezzola, to make the others laugh.

She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt, she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how disappointing–disappointing enough to shed tears over–to have this held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her friend Gerald!

Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer. She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she knew that it was the 228way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she ever felt like this?

That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun, was giving and gay–that was all most people knew, or were entitled to know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another, that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had–probably because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of the devil in her–a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline, no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced, still eager for a good time.

All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but they don’t expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they can.

Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being involved with one’s affections, and the objects of one’s love never far from one’s thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her sorrows, really?