A Daughter of the Morning

by Zona Gale

I had gone wondering how I should see him at last, and what we should say to each other. It never once occurred to me that we might not meet again, or that when we did meet it would mean merely the casual renewing of a casual occasion. As for me everything moved from the time when I had met John Ember, so everything moved toward the time when I should see him again. I pictured meeting him on the street, at Mrs. Carney's house, about the university. I pictured him walking into a class room to give one of the afternoon lectures—older, his hair a little grayed, and yet so wonderfully the same as when he had spoken to me there on the country road. And I could imagine that if I said my name to him he would have to stop and hunt through his mind for any remembrance of that breakfast and that walk which were, so far, the principal things that had ever happened to me.

Then I used to dream that he did remember.

"Mr. Ember, I'm Cosma Wakely. You won't remember—but I just wanted to say 'thank you' for what you did."

And: "Remember. My dear child, I've been looking for you ever since. Sit down—I want to talk with you."

Once I saw his picture in a magazine, looking so grave and serious, and I liked to know that there was that Katytown morning, and that I knew him in a way that none of the rest did; that I'd been with him on that lonely, early road and had heard him talk to me—no matter how stupid I'd acted—and that we'd sat together over breakfast in the yard of the Dew Drop Inn. Just in that I had one of the joys of a woman who loves a great man, and understands him as all those who sit and look up to him can never understand him. I felt as if something of me belonged to John Ember.

And when I did see him, it was as if he had never been away.

I had been twice to see Lena, and found her in the stale-smelling rooms of her aunt, each time at work upon some tawdry finery of her own. One day I thought about begging her to go with me to a gallery that I had found where hung a picture which it seemed to me must speak to her.

She went readily enough—she was always eager to go somewhere in a pathetic hope that some new excitement, adventure, would await her. We walked to the gallery, through the gay absorbed crowd on the avenue; and as we moved among them, the chattering gaiety with which we had left her aunt's, fell from her, the lines deepened about her mouth, and finally she fell silent.

Almost no one was in the little gallery. I led her to the central bench, and we sat down facing the picture that I had brought her to see: A woman in a muslin gown holding a child. I guessed how the Madonnas, in their exquisite absorption and in radiance and in crimson and blue would have for her little to say, as a woman to a woman. But this girl, in the simple line and tone of every day, with a baby in her arms, seemed to me to hold a great fact, and to offer it.