The Call of the Blood

She broke off. A tear had fallen down upon her cheek.

"Avanti Gaspare!" she said.

Gaspare lifted his switch and gave Tito a tap, calling out "Ah!" in a

loud, manly voice. The donkey moved on, tripping carefully among the

stones. They mounted slowly up towards the "Pastorale." Presently

Hermione said to Maurice, who kept beside her in spite of the narrowness

of the path: "Everything seems very strange to me to-day. Can you guess why?"

"I don't know. Tell me," he answered.

"It's this. I never expected to be perfectly happy. We all have our

dreams, I suppose. We all think now and then, 'If only I could have this

with that, this person in that place, I could be happy.' And perhaps we

have sometimes a part of our dream turned into reality, though even that

comes seldom. But to have the two, to have the two halves of our dream

fitted together and made reality--isn't that rare? Long ago, when I was a

girl, I always used to think--'If I could ever be with the one I loved in

the south--alone, quite alone, quite away from the world, I could be

perfectly happy.' Well, years after I thought that I came here. I knew at

once I had found my ideal place. One-half of my dream was made real and

was mine. That was much, wasn't it? But getting this part of what I

longed for sometimes made me feel unutterably sad. I had never seen you

then, but often when I sat on that little terrace up there I felt a

passionate desire to have a human being whom I loved beside me. I loved

no one then, but I wanted, I needed to love. Do men ever feel that? Women

do, often, nearly always I think. The beauty made me want to love.

Sometimes, as I leaned over the wall, I heard a shepherd-boy below in the

ravine play on his pipe, or I heard the goat-bells ringing under the

olives. Sometimes at night I saw distant lights, like fire-flies, lamps

carried by peasants going to their homes in the mountains from a festa in

honor of some saint, stealing upward through the darkness, or I saw the

fishermen's lights burning in the boats far off upon the sea. Then--then

I knew that I had only half my dream, and I was ungrateful, Maurice. I

almost wished that I had never had this half, because it made me realize

what it would be to have the whole. It made me realize the mutilation,

the incompleteness of being in perfect beauty without love. And now--now

I've actually got all I ever wanted, and much more, because I didn't know

then at all what it would really mean to me to have it. And, besides, I

never thought that God would select me for perfect happiness. Why should

he? What have I ever done to be worthy of such a gift?"