Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/148

evening together with mutual friends, when as a matter of fact the girl had been with her Charlot. Anna didn't like the deceit and said so, but Mary refused to be swayed. "It's my comradely duty to help a friend in need," she said, "and besides, it's fun."

Anna's friends were sucked into the frenzy for as in a whirlpool. Their lives were poor and gray, often harsh and even brutal, without pretense, as Holbein painted the face of his royal patron with every wart showing. To break away from the despair of the moment one had borrow the wings of an eagle and rise above it, soaring into the heights of the ideal, enclosing heaven and earth in the width of the human heart. With a deep mystical passion born of her frustration, Anna was seeking for the great whole of being in a world that had been shattered into fragments of classes, races, religions and ideologies, their sharp edges cutting her soul, and making her bleed inwardly, like a bird fatally wounded by an arrow shot into the sky.

She dreaded to venture beyond the borders of convention, like the Mariner in the Middle Ages whom the open seas had lured with irresistible power, yet did not dare to sail beyond the horizon for fear that the ship might reach the end of the world and plunge into the abyss. But, despite herself, she explored the tidal darkness alone, lured by the lodestar of the Ideal.

Monique, Rose and Mary were like blundering stars in a shattered world, but Anna's soul was fixed on the Ideal, the Light that never falters in the wavering night.