Dick Savage and Anne Elizabeth Sistair

The relationship between Dick Savage and Anne Elizabeth Sistair begins by chance on a crowded train to Rome and becomes one of the most consequential personal entanglements in Richard Ellsworth Savage’s wartime service. Their attraction grows through shared travel and a brief reunion, but it cannot survive the conflict between Anne’s hope for marriage and a child and Richard’s insistence that he cannot yet assume those responsibilities. The narrative gives both the exhilaration of their closeness and the lasting cost of his retreat, ending with Anne alone in Paris and Richard left to imagine a life he did not choose.

Meeting and Growing Attachment

Richard meets Anne when he is ordered to travel to Rome with dispatches. Although the first-class compartment is reserved for him and his sergeant, the train is so full that G. H. Barrow asks permission to bring Anne, a member of Near East Relief, aboard. Richard initially objects that the arrangement violates his orders, then relents as the train starts. The practical accommodation creates the setting for an intimacy neither had planned: with the compartment crowded around them and Richard exhausted, their acquaintance begins in fragments of conversation and shared travel.

On the journey, Anne tells Richard about her unsuccessful efforts to reach Europe during the war, her brother’s death while learning to fly in San Antonio, and Barrow’s unwanted romantic attention. Richard and Anne talk while watching the Italian landscape from the train corridor. She finds him attractive and self-reliant, and his fluency in French and Italian, his stories about the war, and his interest in the old towns make Europe seem newly vivid to her. By the time they reach Rome, she has become strongly attached to him. In her account of the relationship, meeting Richard displaces her earlier interest in Barrow and leaves her eager to be with the American officer.

Their first excursion together takes them into the countryside near Tivoli. Walking rather than taking a car, they cross wet pastures and oak woods as showers pass over the Campagna. Anne picks small cyclamens and teases Richard with them. In a secluded hut, their attempt to become intimate goes further than Anne is prepared to accept, and she stops it and leaves. Richard feels rejected and responds with resentment, while Anne explains that she wants him but is not ready to proceed there. She promises that they can find a room in Rome. She also tells him that she is a virgin, a disclosure that makes the difference between their experiences explicit: he has returned from the front, while she has not previously had sex. The interruption does not end their attachment, but it exposes the unequal expectations and vulnerability that will shape it.

Intimacy and the Roman Interlude

Anne and Richard later meet in Rome at Ed Schuyler’s apartment. Before they become intimate, Richard describes his unease at the public ceremonies surrounding Woodrow Wilson’s visit. He sees a contrast between the president’s reception as a source of hope and the authority of Rome’s ancient ruins; he fears that the United States is becoming an imperial power rather than preserving its humanity. Anne, who admires Wilson, is initially troubled by his criticism, but she recognizes his artistic temperament and comforts him. Their emotional closeness is thus bound not only to attraction but also to a moment in which Anne listens to Richard’s doubts about public ideals and power.

They have sex that night. The encounter is difficult and awkward rather than the effortless fulfillment either might have imagined. Afterwards, conversation falters, Anne leaves early, and Richard wanders through Rome’s crowds, flags, and celebrations. His sense of isolation follows the intimacy instead of disappearing with it. Anne’s later recollection supplies a complementary account: she had wanted to be close to him, felt frightened and uncertain during their first experience, and nevertheless felt happy when he was gentle with her the following day. The differing emphasis matters. Richard’s account stresses discomfort and loneliness; Anne remembers fear giving way to tenderness and takes the relationship as the beginning of a shared future.

Their separation gives Anne’s hopes time to harden into expectation. Richard returns to Paris, while she remains with Near East Relief, where she dislikes desk work and longs to travel. A letter from her, accompanied in her thoughts by the cyclamens that recall their walk, tells him she loves him, imagines bringing a handsome husband home to her family, and wishes he would return to Rome. She regrets having stopped their intimacy in the countryside and tells him not to forget her. Richard receives the letter alongside news that Blake Wigglesworth has died of tuberculosis. Anne’s affectionate message therefore arrives amid reminders of loss, but it does not resolve the uncertainty in Richard’s plans.

Pregnancy and the Dispute Over Marriage

When another assignment takes Richard to Rome, Anne greets him with unrestrained affection. She has arranged a small hotel for them, and their reunion leads back to sex. Richard, however, is mentally preoccupied even as they are together. Afterward, over a final evening with Ed Schuyler, he and Anne discuss her suspicion that she is pregnant. She says that more than two months have passed and that she has experienced morning sickness. Richard urges her to do something about the pregnancy and raises the possibility of medical intervention; Anne says she might want a husband and baby if Richard were the husband and the child his.

Richard answers from the pressures he considers decisive. He says he cannot afford a family, believes that he cannot marry while serving in the army, and fears he cannot support a child without a settled career. He also has his mother to support and doubts that his brother Henry can be relied upon. Anne hears the practical objections as a withdrawal of love. Richard says that he does love her, but his words also reduce love to an uncertain feeling and stress that they have had good times together. The scene exposes the gap between them: Anne treats their intimacy as a commitment that can lead to marriage, while Richard treats marriage as an obligation he cannot accept under present circumstances.

For a time, they entertain the possibility of postponing both the birth and marriage until Richard leaves the service. Anne tries remedies she knows and rides frequently, including with Lieutenant Grassi. Her riding and late returns anger the older women at Near East Relief, who send her home to America. When she comes back to Paris, she is still pregnant and hopes Richard will agree to marry her. The narrative presents her return through her own expectations: she has imagined that her family might initially object but eventually accept him, and she believes his ambitions as a poet and future writer will make him successful. She understands the delay as temporary; Richard has not made the same promise with the same certainty.

Rejection and Aftermath

Anne’s understanding changes as soon as she sees Richard’s face when she reaches his hotel. She concludes that he no longer loves her, and the return walk to her hotel through the wet streets becomes a passage into isolation. The next morning Near East Relief arranges her transportation back to the United States, with departure set for four days later. Richard sends her the address of a doctor and a note asking forgiveness and assuring her that things will be all right. Anne tears the note into small pieces and drops them from the window, then cries and falls asleep. The gesture rejects the reassurance rather than repairing the relationship; the evidence does not establish what she ultimately decides about the pregnancy or what follows between them.

Richard’s account of the parting makes clear that the break does not leave him untouched. After Anne leaves, he tells himself that the matter is finished, but he feels sorry for her and imagines her travelling alone through Paris. He wishes he had several lives, one of which he might have spent with her, and connects that unrealized possibility to the cyclamens from their walk. This regret does not undo his refusal. Instead, it shows the difference between feeling attachment and accepting its consequences: he can imagine the life he might have shared with Anne while continuing to act as though marriage and a child are beyond what he can undertake.

Narrative Significance

The relationship is narrated through contrasting perspectives. Richard’s scenes register attraction, anxiety, and regret, while Anne’s retrospective account reveals the future she believes their romance promises. Her confidence that he will marry her and his repeated concern with career, finances, and family obligations turn the pregnancy into a test of whether private affection entails responsibility. It is a test Richard does not meet. Anne’s hopes are not simply an abstract wish for romance: they include a child, marriage, travel, and the belief that Richard’s writing will give them a future. His refusal makes those hopes precarious while leaving the practical and emotional burden with her.

Recurring details give the relationship its shape without resolving it. The cyclamens connect the countryside encounter, Anne’s letter, and Richard’s later thoughts, carrying the memory of a shared afternoon into the periods of distance and regret. Their repeated journeys between Rome and Paris likewise bring them together and then separate them again, while Richard’s military service provides both the circumstance of their meeting and his stated reason for postponing marriage. Their story therefore ends not with reconciliation or a settled outcome, but with two incompatible readings of what their intimacy meant: Anne had treated it as the beginning of a life together, while Richard remains attached to her in feeling but unwilling to accept that life’s obligations.