Left alone, Anne re-read the letter which had prompted her decision to leave Rome at once. Short, hurried as it was, it conveyed the misery of the writer better than pages of outpouring, and Anne did not need the supplication contained in the last lines to lead her to any creature in distress.
“Poor little soul! Poor wretched little thing!” she thought, before she forced herself to attend to the lengthy correspondence which in view of her large circle of Roman friends, such a hurried leave-taking entailed.
Unwilling to hinder Burks in her work of packing, she went herself to post her letters, and to dispatch the telegram which warned Madge Dakin of her arrival in Paris next day.
While she walked to the post-office, while she mingled with the crowds in the street, and vaguely heard the cries of the flower vendors, the cracking of whips, the babel of tongues, her thoughts were far away. Her friend’s letter had told her nothing definite, but Anne guessed the nature of her trouble.
Imperceptibly, from sadness and perplexity her expression became stern. A passionate anger such as for years she had not experienced, grew momentarily stronger.
“Always the same,” she repeated to herself. “Cruel, cynical. Too light-minded to desire anything strongly. Selfish enough to gratify every passing whim——” And then her thoughts received a sudden disconcerting check.
What of the years of loyal friendship he had given her? How could she forget his tenderness and sympathy at the bitterest moment of her life? How ignore either, the many kindnesses difficult for a man wholly cynical, impossible for one wholly selfish, which he had shown to the down-trodden, the beaten, the unsuccessful in life’s struggle?
Once again, for the thousandth time she recognized the complexity of every human being. The baffling contradictions; good interwoven with evil, nobility with meanness, honour with disloyalty. It was the great intricate puzzle of human nature she was once more considering; a tangle which nothing but the cloak of infinite charity can cover. The only cloak which glorifies and reveals what is good and strong, while in pity, in despairing tenderness it hides under its ample folds, the shame, the weakness, the ugly scars of the form it both shelters, and defines.
Anne sighed as she reached the top of the Spanish steps, and leant on the wall to take a last look at the city she loved.
Overhead, that “great inverted bowl we call the sky,” here, deeply blue, surpassingly beautiful. Beneath it, the dancing sunshine playing alike on dome and pinnacle, roof and tree, and on the thousands of men and women in the busy streets. Men and women hiding within their breasts incalculable heights and depths of virtue and vice, actual or potential. Men and women soon to be covered by the earth on which they walked, to make place for another, yet essentially the same swarm of human beings between the same earth and sky, still asking the same questions under the same sunshine, which laughed, and never replied.