Anne Page

by Netta Syrett

First of all, it surely meant freedom from anxiety. No weary heart-breaking toil for a bare existence. No painful counting of hard-earned shillings.

Then,—for the first time Anne felt a definite thrill of pleasure,—it meant the power to help her brother. Hugh should be made happy if money could compass it.

And afterwards? Well, the realization of some of her day-dreams. She could travel. The wonderful material world need no longer be a mirage, a prospect viewed only by the eye of faith and imagination. She might become the possessor of many beautiful things. Pictures, books, furniture, dress. She would have the power to help people; to relieve misery; to do some tangible good. Money was a talisman to unlock some of the exquisite secrets of the world.

Anne paused. Her thoughts, clear at last, and swiftly moving, were suddenly arrested.

Her wealth might do all this, but there was one joy it could not buy, and missing this, all the rest, all the wonders it could work, seemed dust and ashes. Dead Sea fruit. The time for love was gone, and it had become the one impossible, unattainable desire of her whole being.

Missing it, she would miss the meaning of existence.

The pageant of the world might be revealed, but it would be seen under the grey skies of common day; for ever unillumined by the light that never was on land or sea.

Again in her heart there rose the fierce pain, the sickening hunger she had experienced when for the first time in her life, she had seen the eyes of happy lovers.

Swiftly in bitter mockery, her memory placed her once more in the rose-garden, where a week ago René had kissed her hands, and spoken to her in the shaken voice she had never heard from a man’s lips before.

If only she had been the girl to whom he ought to have been pleading! If only she had felt the right to say she loved him too. If only she had been the girl she longed to be, the wisdom of the wise would have seemed an idle song. She would have given him her love, freely, generously, without counting the cost, and the future might have taken care of itself.