Anne Elizabeth

Anne Elizabeth is an American traveler whose journey through wartime and postwar Europe is shaped by a restless desire to get overseas, an unstable closeness with Richard Ellsworth Savage, and a pregnancy that changes the stakes of their relationship. Her story moves from the shared intimacy of a train compartment to a countryside encounter, then to a Paris night that culminates in a dangerous flight. Across these episodes, she is not simply carried along by other people: she seeks experiences, makes choices, and at crucial moments states what she will or will not accept.

Identity and Background

Anne Elizabeth had tried to get overseas throughout World War I. Her brother was killed while learning to fly at San Antonio, a loss that later becomes part of how she introduces herself to French aviators. She is traveling with G. H. Barrow, whom she says has been kind to her on the boat and in Paris but has also tried to make love to her. She finds his advances inconvenient and his behavior foolish, though Richard Ellsworth Savage suggests that Barrow’s interest may not be entirely ridiculous. The exchange establishes Anne Elizabeth as someone moving among men who read her through their own expectations, while she assesses those expectations with a directness that can be wry but does not erase her own uncertainty.

Her journey also connects her to Near East Relief. She says she signed a pledge not to drink or smoke when she joined the organization, and, at the Italian frontier, declines wine while accepting mineral water. The small detail gives her an identifiable rule for herself, but it is not a fixed emblem of restraint: later in Paris she drinks champagne with the aviators. Her conduct changes with the company and the moment, rather than following a single, consistent pose.

Travel and Meeting Richard Ellsworth Savage

During the train journey into Italy, Anne Elizabeth and Richard Ellsworth Savage pass from being strangers to using one another’s first names. At the frontier, both she and G. H. Barrow return from customs and police inspection tired and cross; Savage offers them drinks before they settle back into the compartment. Anne Elizabeth and Savage spend the day looking out at the towns, farmhouses, olive trees, and terraced fields. In that moving, shared view, she tells him about her attempts to travel abroad, her brother’s death, and the difficulty of managing Barrow’s attention. She seems pleased to be traveling with an army officer who has been at the front and can speak Italian, and Savage recognizes the reassurance she takes from his experience.

The connection becomes more intimate during a walk in the countryside above Tivoli. Anne Elizabeth and Savage choose to walk rather than depend on a car, and continue through wet pastures and oak woods as showers pass over the landscape. She picks cyclamens and repeatedly brings them to him; her high spirits and playfulness set the scene’s tone. At a hut, their encounter turns toward greater intimacy, but Anne Elizabeth stops it and insists that they return. Savage reacts with anger and sits brushing the dry plant matter from his uniform. Outside, in the rain, she tells him she is fond of him but objects to his having torn her underwear, then begins to laugh. The episode holds attraction and refusal together: her desire for him does not cancel her right to halt what is happening, and their return to joking does not make his anger disappear from the scene.

Pregnancy and Its Consequences

Later, Anne Elizabeth tells Savage that she believes she is pregnant. More than two months have passed, and she has occasional morning sickness; she says she had felt terrible that day until seeing him made her forget it. She has tried castor oil and quinine, but describes herself as having little knowledge of what else to do. The account is concrete and uncertain: she identifies the duration and symptoms, but neither she nor Savage has a settled plan.

Savage says the situation worries him and that there must be something she can do about it. His response frames the pregnancy as a problem requiring action, while Anne Elizabeth’s answer makes clear how limited her information is. The disclosure alters the meaning of the earlier countryside episode without reducing her to its consequence. It places a continuing physical and practical uncertainty alongside the attraction and conflict that have already marked their relationship.

Paris, the Aviators, and the Flight

In Paris, Anne Elizabeth is at a table where people are discussing the Peace Treaty and whether Germany will sign. Unable to bear the conversation, she goes to the ladies’ room and then looks into the bar. There she meets Pierre, a French aviator, and his fellow aviation officers. When they learn that her brother was an aviator and had been killed, she lets them believe he died at the front, although she had told Savage that he was killed learning to fly at San Antonio. Pierre solemnly offers to act as her brother; she accepts the gesture, and the group seals it with a handshake. The invented circumstance does not replace her brother’s actual history, but the episode shows her presenting that history differently in a new company.

Anne Elizabeth dances with the officers, drinks champagne, and is happy in their company. She sees G. H. Barrow at the doorway, recognizes his indignation, and calls out that she will return in a minute. Pierre later suggests taking her to see Paris. After a drive and a meal of onion soup with more champagne, she keeps asking him to take her up in a plane and perform a loop-the-loop. By dawn they have reached an aviation field. Although Pierre is tired and a mechanic argues against the flight, Anne Elizabeth insists; she is wrapped in a heavy army coat and strapped into the observer’s seat of a Bleriot monoplane.

Once the engine starts, her confidence gives way to fear. She thinks of home and the boat she is meant to catch, then becomes cold and disoriented as the plane climbs above clouds. The flight makes her feel sick, and she worries that the strain could cause a miscarriage. Even so, she reaches toward Pierre, and as the aircraft continues through the sky she begins to see Paris. The sequence leaves the outcome of the flight unresolved in the supplied passage, ending with her still aloft rather than with a report of landing.

Narrative Role

Anne Elizabeth’s episodes are linked by contrasts between self-direction and exposure to risk. She travels because she has persistently wanted to get overseas; on the train she finds pleasure and reassurance in new companionship; in the countryside she both participates in intimacy and draws a boundary; and in Paris she pursues the flight she has asked for even when its danger becomes unmistakable. The pregnancy makes the consequences of intimacy part of her immediate situation, while the flight turns her appetite for experience into a physical ordeal.

The shifts in how she tells her brother’s story, how she treats her pledge, and how she moves between Barrow’s company and the aviators resist a simple portrait of consistency or innocence. Anne Elizabeth is shown in scenes where her choices matter, but where knowledge and control remain incomplete: she can insist on returning from the hut, disclose what she suspects, and demand to fly, yet she cannot settle the pregnancy or govern the conditions of the flight. That tension gives her brief appearances a distinct dramatic force.