VI

Once long ago in the old days in the house on Opal Street she had been taken mysteriously ill. As a matter of fact she had been coming down with that inglorious disease, the mumps. The expense of having a doctor was a consideration, and so for twenty-four hours she was the object of anxious solicitude for the whole house. Her mother had watched over her all night; her father came home twice in the day to see how she felt; Jinny had with some reluctance bestowed on her an oft-coveted, oft-refused doll. In the midst of all her childish pain and suffering she had realized that at least her agony was shared, that her tribulation was understood. But now she was ill with a sickness of the soul and there was no one with whom she could share her anguish.

For two days she lay in her little room; Mrs. Denver, happening in, showered upon her every attention. There was nothing, nothing that Angela could suggest, the little fluttering lady said sincerely, which she might not have. Angela wished that she would go away and leave her alone, but her experiences had rendered her highly sensitive to the needs of others; Mrs. Denver, for all her money, her lack of responsibility, her almost childish appetite for pleasure, was lonely too; waiting on the younger, less fortunate woman gave her a sense of being needed; she was pathetically glad when the girl expressed a desire for anything no matter how expensive or how trivial. Angela could not deprive her entirely of those doubtful pleasures. Still there were moments, of course, when even Mrs. Denver for all her kindly officiousness had to betake herself elsewhere and leave her willing patient to herself and her thoughts.

Minutely, bit by bit, in the long forty-eight hours she went over her life; was there anything, any overt act, any crime which she had committed and for which she might atone? She had been selfish, yes; but, said her reasoning and unwearied mind, “Everybody who survives at all is selfish, it is one of the prerequisites of survival.” In “passing” from one race to the other she had done no harm to anyone. Indeed she had been forced to take this action. But she should not have forsaken Virginia. Here at this point her brain, so clear and active along all other lines, invariably failed her. She could not tell what stand to take; so far as leaving Philadelphia was concerned she had left it to seek her fortune under more agreeable circumstances; if she had been a boy and had left home no one would have had a word of blame, it would have been the proper thing, to be expected and condoned. There remained then only the particular incident of her cutting Jinny on that memorable night in the station. That was the one really cruel and unjust action of her whole life.

“Granted,” said something within her rooted either in extreme hard common sense or else in a vast sophistry, “granted, but does that carry with it as penalty the shattering of a whole life, or even the suffering of years? Certainly the punishment is far in excess of the crime.” And it was then that she would lie back exhausted, hopeless, bewildered, unable to cope further with the myterious and apparently meaningless ferocity of life. For if this were a just penalty for one serious misdemeanour, what compensation should there not be for the years in which she had been a dutiful daughter, a loving sister? And suddenly she found herself envying people possessed of a blind religious faith, of the people who could bow the head submissively and whisper: “Thy will be done.” For herself she could see how beaten and harried, one might subside into a sort of blind passivity, an acceptance of things as they are, but she would never be able to understand a force which gave one the imagination to paint a great desire, the tenacity to cling to it, the emotionalism to spend on its possible realization but which would then with a careless sweep of the hand wipe out the picture which the creature of its own endowment had created.

More than once the thought came to her of dying. But she hated to give up; something innate, something of the spirit stronger than her bodily will, set up a dogged fight, and she was too bruised and sore to combat it. “All right,” she said to herself wearily, “I’ll keep on living.” She thought then of black people, of the race of her parents and of all the odds against living which a cruel, relentless fate had called on them to endure. And she saw them as a people powerfully, almost overwhelmingly endowed with the essence of life. They had to persist, had to survive because they did not know how to die.

Not because she felt like it, but because some day she must begin once more to take up the motions of life, she moved on the third day from her bed to the easy chair, sat there listless and motionless. Tomorrow she would return to work⁠—to work and the sick agony of forcing her mind back from its dolorous, painful, vital thoughts to some consideration of the dull, uninteresting task in hand. God, how she hated that! She remembered studying her lessons as a girl; the intense absorption with which she used to concentrate. Sometimes she used to wonder: “Oh what will it be like when I am grown up; when I won’t be studying lessons⁠ ⁠…” Well, this was what it was like. Or no, she was still studying with the same old absorption⁠—an absorption terribly, painfully concentrated⁠—the lessons set down by life. It was useless to revolve in her head the causes for her suffering, they were so trivial, so silly. She said to herself, “There is no sorrow in the world like my sorrow,” and knew even as she said it that someone else, perhaps only in the next block, in the next house, was saying the same thing.

Mrs. Denver tapped lightly, opened the door, came in closing it mysteriously behind her.

“I’ve a great surprise for you.” She went on with an old childish formula: “Will you have it now, or wait till you get it?”

Angela’s features twisted into a wan smile. “I believe I’d better have it now. I’m beginning to think I don’t care for surprises.”

“You’ll like this one.” She went to the door and ushered in Rachel Salting.

“I know you two want to talk,” Mrs. Denver called over her shoulder. “Cheer her up, Rachel, and I’ll bring you both a fine spread in an hour or so.” She closed the door carefully behind her.

Angela said, “What’s the matter, Rachel?” She almost added, “I hardly knew you.” For her friend’s face was white and wan with grief and hopelessness; gone was all her dainty freshness, her pretty colour; indeed her eyes, dark, sunken, set in great pools of blackness, were the only note⁠—a terrible note⁠—of relief against that awful whiteness.

Angela felt her strength leaving her; she rose and tottered back to the grateful security of her bed, lay down with an overwhelming sense of thankfulness for the asylum afforded her sudden faintness. In a moment, partly recovered, she motioned to Rachel to sit beside her.

“Oh,” said Rachel, “you’ve been ill⁠—Mrs. Denver told me. I ought not to come bothering you with my worries. Oh, Angèle, I’m so wretched! Whatever shall I do?”

Her friend, watching her, was very gentle. “There’re lots of awful things that can happen. I know that, Rachel. Maybe your trouble isn’t so bad that it can’t be helped. Have you told John about it?” But even as she spoke she sensed that the difficulty in some way concerned John. Her heart contracted at the thought of the pain and suffering to be endured.

“Yes, John knows⁠—it’s about him. Angèle, we can’t marry.”

“Can’t marry. Why, is he⁠—it can’t be that he’s⁠—involved with someone else!”

A momentary indignation flashed into Rachel’s face bringing back life and colour. For a small space she was the Rachel Salting of the old happy days. “Involved with someone else!” The indignation was replaced by utter despair. “How I wish he were! That at least could be arranged. But this can never be altered. He⁠—I, our parents are dead set against it. Hadn’t you ever noticed, Angèle? He’s a Gentile and I’m a Jew.”

“But lots of Jews and Gentiles marry.”

“Yes, I know. Only⁠—he’s a Catholic. But my parents are orthodox⁠—they will never consent to my marriage. My father says he’d rather see me dead and my mother just sits and moans. I kept it from her as long as I could⁠—I used to pray about it, I thought God must let it turn out all right, John and I love each other so. But I went up to Utica the other day, John went with me, and we told them. My father drove him out of the house; he said if I married him he’d curse me. I am afraid of that curse. I can’t go against them. Oh, Angèle, I wish I’d never been born.”

It was a delicate situation; Angela had to feel her way; she could think of nothing but the trite and obvious. “After all, Rachel, your parents have lived their lives; they have no business trying to live yours. Personally I think all this pother about race and creed and colour, tommyrot. In your place I should certainly follow my own wishes; John seems to be the man for you.”

But Rachel weeping, imbued with the spirit of filial piety, thought it would be selfish.

“Certainly no more selfish than their attempt to regulate your life for you.”

“But I’m afraid,” said Rachel shivering, “of my father’s curse.” It was difficult for Angela to sympathize with an attitude so archaic; she was surprised to find it lurking at the bottom of her friend’s well-trained intelligence.

“Love,” she said musing to herself rather than to her friend, “is supposed to be the greatest thing in the world but look how we smother and confine it. Jews mustn’t marry Catholics; white people mustn’t marry coloured⁠—”

“Oh well, of course not,” Rachel interrupted in innocent surprise. “I wouldn’t marry a nigger in any circumstances. Why, would you?”

But Angela’s only answer was to turn and, burying her head in her pillow, to burst into unrestrained and bitter laughter. Rachel went flying to call Mrs. Denver.

“Oh come quick, come quick! Angèle’s in hyterics. I haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do for her!”

Once more the period of readjustment. Once more the determination to take life as she found it; bitter dose after sweet, bitter after sweet. But it seemed to her now that both sweetness and bitterness together with her high spirit for adventure lay behind her. How now was she to pass through the tepid, tasteless days of her future? She was not quite twenty-seven, and she found herself wondering what life would be like in ten, five, even one year’s time. Changes did flow in upon one, she knew, but in her own case she had been so used herself to give the impetus to these changes. Now she could not envisage herself as making a move in any direction. With the new sullenness which seemed to be creeping upon her daily, she said “Whatever move I make is always wrong. Let life take care of itself.” And she saw life, even her own life, as an entity quite outside her own ken and her own directing. She did not care greatly what happened; she would not, it was true, take her own life, but she would not care if she should die. Once if her mind had harboured such thoughts she would have felt an instant self-pity. “What a shame that I so young, so gifted, with spirits so high should meet with death!” But now her senses were blunting; so much pain and confusion had brought about their inevitable attrition. “I might just as well be unhappy, or meet death as anyone else,” she told herself still with that mounting sullenness.

Mrs. Denver, the Sandburgs and Ashley were the only people who saw her. It did seem to Mrs. Denver that the girl’s ready, merry manner was a little dimmed; if her own happy, sunny vocabulary had known the term she would have daubed her cynical. The quasi-intellectual atmosphere at the Sandburgs suited her to perfection; the faint bitterness which so constantly marred her speech was taken for sophistication, her frequent silences for profoundness; in a small way, aided by her extraordinary good looks and the slight mystery which always hung about her, she became quite a personage in their entourage; the Sandburgs considered her a splendid find and plumed themselves on having “brought her out.”

The long golden summer, so beautiful with its promise of happiness, so sickening with its actuality of pain ripened into early, exquisite September. Virginia was home again; slightly more golden, very, very faintly plumper, like a ripening fruit perfected; brimming with happiness, excitement and the most complete content, Angela thought, that she had ever seen in her life.

Jinny sent for the older girl and the two sat on a Sunday morning, away from Sara Penton and the other too insistent friends, over on Riverside Drive looking out at the river winding purple and alluring in the soft autumn haze.

“Weren’t you surprised?” asked Jinny. Laconically, Angela admitted to no slight amazement. She still loved her sister but more humbly, less achingly than before. Their lives, she thought now would never, could never touch and she was quite reconciled. Moreover, in some of Virginia’s remarks there was the hint of the acceptance of such a condition. Something had brought an irrevocable separation. They would always view each other from the two sides of an abyss, narrow but deep, deep.

The younger girl prattled on. “I don’t know whether Sara told you his name⁠—Anthony Cross? Isn’t it a dear name?”

“Yes, it’s a nice name, a beautiful name,” said Angela heartily; when she had learned it was of no consequence. She added without enthusiasm that she knew him already; he had been a member of her class at Cooper Union.

“You don’t talk as though you were very much taken with him,” said Jinny, making a face. “But never mind, he suits me, no matter whom he doesn’t suit.” There was that in her countenance which made Angela realize and marvel again at the resoluteness of that firm young mind. No curse of parents could have kept Virginia from Anthony’s arms. As long as Anthony loved her, was satisfied to have her love, no one could come between them. Only if he should fail her would she shrivel up and die.

On the heels of this thought Virginia made an astounding remark: “You know it’s just perfect that I met Anthony; he’s really been a rock in a weary land. Next to Matthew Henson he will, I’m sure, make me happier than any man in the world.” Dreamily she added an afterthought: “And I’ll make him happy too, but, oh, Angela, Angela, I always wanted to marry Matthew!”

The irony of that sent Angela home. Virginia wanting Matthew and marrying Anthony; Anthony wanting Angela and marrying Virginia. Herself wanting Anthony and marrying, wanting, no other; unable to think of, even to dream of another lover. The irony of it was so palpable, so ridiculously palpable that it put her in a better mood; life was bitter but it was amusingly bitter; if she could laugh at it she might be able to outwit it yet. The thought brought Anthony to mind: “If I could only get a laugh on life, Angèle!”

Sobered, she walked from the bus stop to Jayne Street. Halfway up the narrow, tortuous stair case she caught sight of a man climbing, climbing. He stopped outside her door. “Anthony?” she said to herself while her heart twisted with pain. “If it is Anthony⁠—” she breathed, and stopped. But something within her, vital, cruel, persistent, completed her thought. “If it is Anthony⁠—after what Virginia said this morning⁠—if he knew that he was not the first, that even as there had been one other there might still be others; that Virginia in her bright, hard, shallow youthfulness would not die any more than she had died over Matthew⁠—would console herself for the loss of Anthony even as she had consoled herself for the loss of Matthew!” But no, what Jinny had told her was in confidence, a confidence from sister to sister. She would never break faith with Jinny again; nor with herself.

“But Anthony,” she said to herself in the few remaining seconds left on the staircase, “you were my first love and I think I was yours.”

However, the man at the door was not Anthony; on the contrary he was, she thought, a complete stranger. But as he turned at her footsteps, she found herself looking into the blue eyes of Roger. Completely astounded, she greeted him, “You don’t mean it’s you, Roger?”

“Yes,” he said humbly, shamefacedly, “aren’t you going to let me in, Angèle?”

“Oh yes, of course, of course”; she found herself hoping that he would not stay long. She wanted to think and she would like to paint; that idea must have been in the back of her head ever since she had left Jinny. Hard on this thought came another. “Here’s Roger. I never expected to see him in these rooms again; perhaps some day Anthony will come back. Oh, God, be kind!”

But she must tear her thoughts away from Anthony. She looked at Roger curiously, searchingly; in books the man who had treated his sweetheart unkindly often returned beaten, dejected, even poverty-stricken, but Roger, except for a slight hesitation in his manner, seemed as jaunty, as fortunate, as handsome as ever. He was even a trifle stouter.

Contrasting him with Anthony’s hard-bitten leanness, she addressed him half absently. “I believe you’re actually getting fat!”

His quick high flush revealed his instant sensitiveness to her criticism. But he was humble. “That’s all right, Angèle. I deserve anything you choose to say if you’ll just say it.”

She was impervious to his mood, utterly indifferent, so indifferent that she was herself unaware of her manner. “Heavens, I’ve sort of forgotten, but I don’t remember your ever having been so eager for criticism heretofore!”

He caught at one phrase. “Forgotten! You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten the past and all that was once so dear to us?”

Impatience overwhelmed her. She wished he would go and leave her to her thoughts and to her picture; such a splendid idea had come to her; it was the first time for weeks that she had felt like working. Aware of the blessed narcotic value of interesting occupation, she looked forward to his departure with a sense of relief; even hoped with her next words to precipitate it.

“Roger, you don’t mean to say that you called on me on a hot September Sunday just to talk to me in that theatrical manner? I don’t mind telling you I’ve a million things to do this afternoon; let’s get down to bedrock so we can both be up and doing.”

She had been sitting, almost lolling at ease in the big chair, not regarding him, absently twisting a scarf in her fingers. Now she glanced up and something in the hot blueness of his eyes brought her to an upright position, alert, attentive.

“Angèle, you’ve got to take me back.”

“Back! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Between you and me there is no past, so don’t mention it. If you’ve nothing better to say than that, you might as well get out.”

He tried to possess himself of her hands but she shook him off, impatiently, angrily, with no pretence at feeling. “Go away, Roger. I don’t want to be bothered with you!” This pinchbeck emotionalism after the reality of her feeling for Anthony, the sincerity of his feeling for her! “I won’t have this sort of thing; if you won’t go I will.” She started for the door but he barred her way, suddenly straight and serious.

“No listen, Angèle, you must listen. I’m in earnest this time. You must forgive me for the past, for the things I said. Oh, I was unspeakable! But I had it in my head⁠—you don’t know the things a man has borne in on him about designing women⁠—if he’s got anything, family, money⁠—” she could see him striving to hide his knowledge of his vast eligibility. “I thought you were trying to ‘get’ me, it made me suspicious, angry. I knew you were poor⁠—”

“And nobody! Oh say it, say it!”

“Well, I will say it. According to my father’s standards, nobody. And when you began to take an interest in me, in my affairs⁠—”

“You thought I was trying to marry you. Well, at first I was. I was poor, I was nobody! I wanted to be rich, to be able to see the world, to help people. And then when you and I came so near to each other I didn’t care about marriage at all⁠—just about living! Oh, I suppose my attitude was perfectly pagan. I hadn’t meant to drift into such a life, all my training was against it, you can’t imagine how completely my training was against it. And then for a time I was happy. I’m afraid I didn’t love you really, Roger, indeed I know now that in a sense I didn’t love you, but somehow life seemed to focus into an absolute perfection. Then you became petulant, ugly, suspicious, afraid of my interest, of my tenderness. And I thought, ‘I can’t let this all end in a flame of ugliness; it must be possible for people to have been lovers and yet remain friends.’ I tried so hard to keep things so that it would at least remain a pleasant memory. But you resented my efforts. What I can’t understand is⁠—why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to, either try to marry you or to make an ideal thing of our relationship? Why is it that men like you resent an effort on our part to make our commerce decent? Well, it’s all over now.⁠ ⁠… Theoretically ‘free love’ or whatever you choose to call it, is all right. Actually, it’s all wrong. I don’t want any such relationship with you or with any other man in this world. Marriage was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me.”

“There’s nothing good enough for you, Angèle; but marriage is the best thing that I have to offer and I’m offering you just that. And it’s precisely because you were honest and frank and decent and tried to keep our former relationship from deteriorating into sordidness that I am back.”

Clearly she was staggered. Marriage with Roger meant protection, position, untold wealth, unlimited opportunities for doing good. Once how she would have leapt to such an offer!

“What’s become of Carlotta?” she asked bluntly.

“She’s on the eve of marrying Tom Estes, a fellow who was in college with me. He has heaps more money than I. Carlotta thought she’d better take him on.”

“I see.” She looked at him thoughtfully, then the remembrance of her great secret came to her, a secret which she could never share with Roger. No! No more complications and their consequent disaster! “No, no, we won’t talk about it any more. What you want is impossible; you can’t guess how completely impossible.”

He strode toward her, seized her hands. “I’m in earnest, Angèle; you’ve no idea how tired I am of loneliness and uncertainty and⁠—and of seeking women; I want someone whom I can love and trust, whom I can teach to love me⁠—we could get married tomorrow. There’s not an obstacle in our way.”

His sincerity left her unmoved. “What would your father say?”

“Oh, we wouldn’t be able to tell him yet; he’d never consent! Of course we’d have to keep things quiet, just ourselves and one or two friends, Martha and Ladislas perhaps, would be in the know.”

More secrets! She pulled her hands away from him. “Oh Roger, Roger! I wouldn’t consider it. No, when I marry I want a man, a man, a real one, someone not afraid to go on his own!” She actually pushed him toward the door. “Some people might revive dead ashes, but not you and I.⁠ ⁠… I’d never be able to trust you again and I’m sick of secrets and playing games with human relationships. I’m going to take my friendships straight hereafter. Please go. I’ve had a hard summer and I’m very tired. Besides I want to work.”

Baffled, he looked at her, surprise and indignation struggling in his face. “Angèle, are you sure you know what you’re doing? I’ve no intention of coming back, so you’d better take me now.”

“Of course you’re not coming back! I’m sure I wouldn’t want you to; my decision is final.” Not unsympathetically she laughed up into his doleful face, actually touched his cheek. “If you only knew how much you look like a cross baby!”

Her newly developed sympathy and understanding made her think of Ashley. Doubtless Carlotta’s defection would hit him very hard. Her conjecture was correct although the effect of the blow was different from what she had anticipated. Ashley was not so perturbed over the actual loss of the girl as confirmed in his opinion that he was never going to be able to form and keep a lasting friendship. In spite of his wealth, his native timidity had always made him distrustful of himself with women of his own class; a veritable Tony Hardcastle, he spent a great deal of time with women whom he did not actually admire, whom indeed he disliked, because, he said to Angela wistfully, they were the only ones who took him seriously.

“No one but you and Carlotta have ever given me any consideration, have ever liked me for myself, Angèle.”

They were seeing a great deal of each other; in a quiet, unemotional way they were developing a real friendship. Angela had taken up her painting again. She had reentered the classes at Cooper Union and was working with great zest and absorption on a subject which she meant to enter in the competition for scholarships at the school at Fontainebleau. Ashley, who wrote some good verse in the recondite, falsely free style of the present day, fell into the habit of bringing his work down to her little living room, and in the long tender autumn evenings the two worked seriously, with concentration. Ashley had travelled widely and had seen a great deal of life, though usually from the sidelines; Angela for all her lack of wandering, “had lived deeply,” he used to tell her, pondering on some bit of philosophy which she let fall based on the experiences of her difficult life.

“You know, in your way you’re quite a wonder, Angèle; there’s a mystery hanging about you; for all your good spirits, your sense of humour, you’re like the Duse, you seem to move in an aura of suffering, of the pain which comes from too great sensitivity. And yet how can that be so? You’re not old enough, you’ve had too few contacts to know how unspeakable life can be, how damnably she can get you in wrong⁠—”

An enigmatic smile settled on her face. “I don’t know about life, Ralph? How do you think I got the idea for this masterpiece of mine?” She pointed to the painting on which she was then engaged.

“That’s true, that’s true. I’ve wondered often about that composition; lots of times I’ve meant to ask you how you came to evolve it. But keep your mystery to yourself, child; it adds to your charm.”

About this she had her own ideas. Mystery might add to the charm of personality but it certainly could not be said to add to the charm of living. Once she thought that stolen waters were sweetest, but now it was the unwinding road and the open book that most intrigued.

Ashley, she found, for all his shyness, possessed very definite ideas and convictions of his own, was absolutely unfettered in his mode of thought, and quite unmoved by social traditions and standards. An aristocrat if ever there were one, he believed none the less in the essential quality of man and deplored the economic conditions which so often tended to set up superficial and unreal barriers which make as well as separate the classes.

With some trepidation Angela got him on the subject of colour. He considered prejudice the greatest blot on America’s shield. “We’re wrong, all wrong about those people; after all they did to make America habitable! Some day we’re going to wake up to our shame. I hope it won’t be too late.”

“But you wouldn’t want your sister to marry a nigger!”

“I’m amazed, Angèle, at your using such a word as an exclusive term. I’ve known some fine coloured people. There’re hardly any of unmixed blood in the United States, so the term Negro is usually a misnomer. I haven’t a sister; if I had I’d advise her against marriage with an American coloured man because the social pressure here would probably be too great, but that would be absolutely the only ground on which I’d object to it. And I can tell you this; I wouldn’t care to marry a woman from the Congo but if I met a coloured woman of my own nationality, well-bred, beautiful, sympathetic, I wouldn’t let the fact of her mixed blood stand in my way, I can tell you.”

A sort of secondary interest in living was creeping into to her perspective. The high lights, the high peaks had faded from her sight. She would never, she suspected, know such spontaneity of feeling and attitude again as she had felt toward both Roger and Anthony. Nor would she again approach the experiences of existence with the same naive expectation, the same desire to see how things would turn out. Young as she was she felt like a battle-scarred veteran who, worn out from his own strenuous activities, was quite content to sit on the sidelines gazing at all phases of warfare with an equal eye.

Although she no longer intended to cast in her lot with Virginia, she made no further effort to set up barriers between herself and coloured people. Let the world take her as it would. If she were in Harlem, in company with Virginia and Sara Penton she went out to dinner, to the noisy, crowded, friendly “Y” dining-room, to “Gert’s” tearoom, to the clean, inviting drugstore for rich sundaes. Often, too, she went shopping with her sister and to the theatre; she had her meet Ashley and Martha. But she was careful in this company to avoid contact with people whose attitude on the race question was unknown, or definitely antagonistic.

Harlem intrigued her; it was a wonderful city; it represented, she felt, the last word in racial pride, integrity and even self-sacrifice. Here were people of a very high intellectual type, exponents of the realest and most essential refinement living cheek by jowl with coarse or ill-bred or even criminal, certainly indifferent, members of their race. Of course some of this propinquity was due to outer pressure, but there was present, too, a hidden consciousness of race-duty, a something which if translated said: “Perhaps you do pull me down a little from the height to which I have climbed. But on the other hand, perhaps, I’m helping you to rise.”

There was a hairdresser’s establishment on 136th Street where Virginia used to have her beautiful hair treated; where Sara Penton, whose locks were of the same variety as Matthew’s, used to repair to have their unruliness “pressed.” Here on Saturdays Angela would accompany the girls and sit through the long process just to overhear the conversations, grave and gallant and gay, of these people whose blood she shared but whose disabilities by a lucky fluke she had been able to avoid. For, while she had been willing for the sake of Anthony to re-enlist in the struggles of this life, she had never closed her eyes to its disadvantages; to its limitedness! What a wealth of courage it took for these people to live! What high degree of humour, determination, steadfastness, undauntedness were not needed⁠—and poured forth! Maude, the proprietress of the business, for whom the establishment was laconically called “Maude’s,” was a slight, sweet-faced woman with a velvety seal-brown skin, a charming voice and an air of real refinement. She was from Texas, but had come to New York to seek her fortune, had travelled as ladies’ maid in London and Paris, and was as thoroughly conversant with the arts of her calling as any hairdresser in the vicinity of the Rue de la Paix or on Fifth Avenue. A rare quality of hospitality emanated from her presence; her little shop was always full not only of patrons but of callers, visitors from “down home,” actresses from the current coloured “show,” flitting in like radiant birds of paradise with their rich brown skins, their exotic eyes and the gaily coloured clothing which an unconscious style had evolved just for them.

In this atmosphere, while there was no coarseness, there was no restriction; life in busy Harlem stopped here and yawned for a delicious moment before going on with its pressure and problems. A girl from Texas, visiting “the big town” for a few weeks took one last glance at her shapely, marvellously “treated” head, poised for a second before the glass and said simply, “Well, goodbye, Maude; I’m off for the backwoods, but I’ll never forget Harlem.” She passed out with the sinuous elegant carriage acquired in her few weeks’ sojourn on Seventh Avenue.

A dark girl, immaculate in white from head to foot, asked: “What’s she going back South for? Ain’t she had enough of Texas yet?”

Maude replied that she had gone back there because of her property. “Her daddy owns most of the little town where they live.”

“Child, ain’t you learned that you don’t never own no property in Texas as long as those white folks are down there too? Just let those Ku Kluxers get it into their heads that you’ve got something they want. She might just as well leave there first as last; she’s bound to have to some day. I know it’s more’n a notion to pull up stakes and start all over again in a strange town and a strange climate, but it’s the difference between life and death. I know I done it and I don’t expect ever to go back.”

She was a frail woman, daintily dressed and shod. Her voice was soft and drawling. But Angela saw her sharply as the epitome of the iron and blood in a race which did not know how to let go of life.