Anne Elizabeth’s pregnancy

Anne Elizabeth’s pregnancy turns an uncertain relationship with Richard Ellsworth Savage into a question of marriage, livelihood, and who will bear the consequences of their choices. She hopes that the child will bind them together; Richard weighs that hope against his military service, a prospective career, and his obligation to support his mother. As the pregnancy persists, their tentative plans give way to her return to America, with its outcome still unresolved in the episodes presented.

Discovery and First Negotiations

In late February, after a long and dismal journey to Vienna, Richard receives a letter from Anne Elizabeth asking him to come to Rome. She writes that something is happening that may change their lives and that she is worried, but still trusts him. When they meet, she explains that she has been experiencing symptoms for more than two months and believes she is pregnant. The news brings their relationship out of the realm of postcards and visits and forces them to discuss what they will do.

Anne Elizabeth does not speak of the pregnancy only as a crisis. She tells Richard that she might want a husband and a baby if he were the husband and the child were his. Richard responds with alarm about the practical consequences. He says he cannot afford marriage and believes the army will not permit it; Anne Elizabeth quietly corrects him on that point. His reluctance is not limited to military rules: he says he cannot support a child before establishing a career and must also provide for his mother, while his brother Henry cannot be relied on. He still professes affection, but describes their past as good times rather than making a definite commitment to parenthood or marriage.

The scene makes their unequal expectations visible without resolving them. Anne Elizabeth asks whether his hesitation means he no longer loves her. Richard denies that, yet his answer offers no firm plan. His worries concern the obligations a child would create; hers include the possibility of being left to face those obligations alone. The pregnancy therefore becomes both a shared fact and a test of what each understands their relationship to require.

A Conditional Promise

Anne Elizabeth tries to make marriage possible by offering to postpone the baby and avoid hindering Richard’s career. She says she would work if they married and acknowledges that he needs time for his poetry. Richard replies that, if they did not have the baby, perhaps they could arrange a marriage. Her excitement at this possibility briefly lifts the conversation, but his qualification remains: the prospect depends on a change in the pregnancy, rather than on an unconditional decision to marry and raise the child together.

Richard’s position is shaped by the future he expects to pursue and by his family responsibilities. Anne Elizabeth, by contrast, reassures him that she will not obstruct his ambitions and imagines that they could make a life together. The exchange does not establish that they marry or that she agrees to any particular course. Instead, it leaves them with a conditional understanding: marriage might be possible if the child were no longer part of their immediate plans. That uncertainty follows them into the months that come after.

Riding and the Return to Paris

Anne Elizabeth continues to believe that Richard will marry her after his service. She and Richard had come to think it might be better to defer both the baby and marriage until he left the army, and she tries various measures while riding frequently with Lieutenant Grassi, an English-speaking Italian officer who praises her riding. Her activities do not resolve the pregnancy. Her late returns from rides, however, anger the older women at the organization where she works, and they send her home to America.

On the train to Paris, Anne Elizabeth is frightened: the riding has not changed the situation, and she is nearly three months pregnant. She thinks that she and Richard will have to marry at once. She even considers concealing the timing by saying they had married in Rome, a thought that shows how urgently she is trying to reconcile her circumstances with the expectations awaiting her at home. Yet this imagined explanation cannot secure Richard’s agreement. When she sees his face as she approaches him at his hotel, she concludes that he no longer loves her. She returns alone to her hotel through the wet streets, uncertain how to face going home.

The pregnancy has also placed her in conflict with the organization’s demands and her position within it. Her riding is at once an effort to alter her circumstances and the conduct that leads the organization to send her away. The journey back to Paris thus brings together two setbacks: the pregnancy remains, and the work that has kept her in Europe is ending. Neither development gives her the reassurance she had expected from Richard.

Refusal and Unresolved Outcome

When Anne Elizabeth reaches Richard again in May, he has just returned from Cologne and is recovering at his hotel. She says her organization is sending her home and explains that a fall from a horse at Ostia has not changed the pregnancy. She is distressed, worries about her father’s reaction, and accuses Richard of treating her cruelly. He repeats that he has been offered a good position after military service and cannot take on a wife and child at that stage. He suggests that she could marry someone else, but this does not answer the question of his own responsibility to her.

Anne Elizabeth tries to manage the immediate crisis herself. She tells Richard not to worry about her and says she will find a way to manage. He offers to find a doctor’s address and send it to her, expressing the belief that it may not be too late for an operation. She leaves without accepting or rejecting that offer in the narrated exchange. Richard is left to imagine her traveling home alone, but the text does not confirm what she does next, whether the pregnancy continues, or whether they marry.

The episodes therefore present no settled resolution, only the narrowing of Anne Elizabeth’s choices and the contrast between her initial hope and Richard’s repeated deferral. At first, she imagines a shared future and believes marriage will follow; later, she returns to Paris frightened, recognizes his withdrawal, and leaves with a doctor’s address rather than a promise. The pregnancy exposes the practical and emotional costs of their unequal commitment, while leaving its final consequences outside the account.