“I will try to love her as you have loved me, Aunt, always.”
She gripped my hand. “Janey,” she muttered, “my girl.” We sat a long time silent. The desire to unburden all my heart was unbearable. But it was too late now.
“Europe is too full of people, Aunt. They have made the earth into a trivial thing. It is not good for people to subdue the earth. In Paris one is never out of doors. I don’t feel at home there. I am sick for my own country, for a wide prairie and a high sky.”
“You’ll come back again, Jane.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I will come back.”
I thought she was asking for a promise. I did not know that she was stating a prophecy.
And in the morning I went aboard my ship and my aunt left me and went down the gangway onto the pier, and the ship moved slowly away from the dock. There she was again, standing in the crowd in her queer black clothes, but this time the water between us was widening. She lifted both her arms to me in a last large gesture of full embrace, then her arms fell to her sides, and she stood there buffeted by the wind, jostled by the crowd, a strong old woman, looking after me bravely. I had a desperate moment. I wanted to jump, to swim back. I felt an agony of regret, of longing, of warning. I struggled. It was horrible, such pain. What did it mean? Why was I going? It was wrong, it was wrong.
I never saw her again.