Plum Bun + 

I + 

Angela wanted to ride downtown with her sister. “Perhaps I might bring you luck.” But on this theme Jinny was adamant. “You’d be much more likely to bring yourself bad luck. No, there’s no sense in taking a chance. I’ll take the elevated; my landlady said it would drop me very near the school where I’m taking the examination. You go some other way.” Down in the hall Mrs. Gloucester was busy dusting, her short bustling figure alive with housewifely ardour. Virginia paused near her and held out her hand to Angela. “Goodbye, Miss Mory,” she said wickedly, “it was very kind of you to give me so much time. If you can ever tear yourself away from your beloved Village, come up and I’ll try to show you Harlem. I don’t think it’s going to take me long to learn it.” + 

Obediently Angela let her go her way and walking over to Seventh Avenue mounted the bus, smarting a little under Jinny’s generous precautions. But presently she began to realize their value, for at 114th Street Anthony Cross entered. He sat down beside her. “I never expected to see you in my neighbourhood.” + 

“Oh is this where you live? I’ve often wondered.” + 

“As it happens I’ve just come here, but I’ve lived practically all over New York.” He was thin, restless, unhappy. His eyes dwelt ceaselessly on her face. She said a little nervously: + 

“It seems to me I hardly ever see you any more. What do you do with yourself?” + 

“Nothing that you would be interested in.” + 

She did not dare make the obvious reply and after all, though she did like him very much, she was not interested in his actions. For a long moment she sought for some phrase which would express just the right combination of friendliness and indifference. + 

“It’s been a long time since we’ve had lunch together; come and have it today with me. You be my guest.” She thought of Jinny and the possible sale of the house. “I’ve just found out that I’m going to get a rather decent amount of money, certainly enough to stand us for lunch.” + 

“Thank you, I have an engagement; besides I don’t want to lunch with you in public.” + 

This was dangerous ground. Flurried, she replied unwisely: “All right, come in some time for tea; every once in a while I make a batch of cookies; I made some a week ago. Next time I feel the mood coming on me I’ll send you a card and you can come and eat them, hot and hot.” + 

“You know you’ve no intention of doing any such thing. Besides you don’t know my address.” + 

“An inconvenience which can certainly be rectified,” she laughed at him. + 

But he was in no laughing mood. “I’ve no cards with me, but they wouldn’t have the address anyway.” He tore a piece of paper out of his notebook, scribbled on it. “Here it is. I have to get off now.” He gave her a last despairing look. “Oh, Angel, you know you’re never going to send for me!” + 

The bit of paper clutched firmly in one hand, she arrived finally at her little apartment. Naturally of an orderly turn of mind she looked about for her address book in which to write the street and number. But some unexplained impulse led her to smooth the paper out and place it in a corner of her desk. That done she took off her hat and gloves, sat down in the comfortable chair and prepared to face her thoughts. + 

Yesterday! Even now at a distance of twenty-four hours she had not recovered her equilibrium. She was still stunned, still unable to realize the happening of the day. Only she knew that she had reached a milestone in her life; a possible turning point. If she did not withdraw from her acquaintanceship with Roger now, even though she committed no overt act she would never be the same; she could never again face herself with the old, unshaken pride and self-confidence. She would never be the same to herself. If she withdrew, then indeed, indeed she would be the same old Angela Murray, the same girl save for a little sophistication that she had been before she left Philadelphia, only she would have started on an adventure and would not have seen it to its finish, she would have come to grips with life and would have laid down her arms at the first onslaught. Would she be a coward or a wise, wise woman? She thought of two poems that she had read in Hart’s Class-Book, an old, old book of her father’s⁠—one of them ran: + 

“He either fears his fate too much + 

Or his deserts are small, + 

Who dares not put it to the touch + 

For fear of losing all.” + 

The other was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cowardice: + 

“He who fights and runs away + 

Shall live to fight another day + 

But he who is in battle slain + 

Has fallen ne’er to rise again.” + 

Were her deserts small or should she run away and come back to fight another day when she was older, more experienced? More experienced! How was she to get that experience? Already she was infinitely wiser, she would, if occasion required it, exercise infinitely more wariness than she had yesterday with Roger. Yet it was precisely because of that experience that she would know how to meet, would even know when to expect similar conditions. + 

She thought that she knew which verse she would follow if she were Jinny, but, back once more in the assurance of her own rooms, she knew that she did not want to be Jinny, that she and Jinny were two vastly different persons. “But,” she said to herself, “if Jinny were as fair as I and yet herself and placed in the same conditions as those in which I am placed her colour would save her. It’s a safeguard for Jinny; it’s always been a curse for me.” + 

Roger had come for her in the blue car. There were a hamper and two folding chairs and a rug stored away in it. It was a gorgeous day. “If we can,” he said, “we’ll picnic.” He was extremely handsome and extremely nervous. Angela was nervous too, though she did not show it except in the loss of her colour. She was rather plain today; to be so near the completion of her goal and yet to have to wait these last few agonizing moments, perhaps hours, was deadly. They were rather silent for a while, Roger intent on his driving. Traffic in New York is a desperate strain at all hours, at eleven in the morning it is deadly; the huge leviathan of a city is breaking into the last of its stride. For a few hours it will proceed at a measured though never leisurely pace and then burst again into the mad rush of the homeward bound. + 

But at last they were out of the city limits and could talk. For the first time since she had known him he began to speak of his possessions. “Anything, anything that money can buy, Angèle, I can get and I can give.” His voice was charged with intention. They were going in the direction of Forest Hills; he had a cottage out there, perhaps she would like to see it. And there was a grove not far away. “We’ll picnic there,” he said, “and⁠—and talk.” He certainly was nervous, Angela thought, and liked him the better for it. + 

The cottage or rather the house in Forest Hills was beautiful, absolutely a gem. And it was completely furnished with taste and marked daintiness. “What do you keep it furnished for?” asked Angela wondering. Roger murmured that it had been empty for a long time but he had seen this equipment and it had struck him that it was just the thing for this house so he had bought it; thereby insensibly reminding his companion again that he could afford to gratify any whim. They drove away from the exquisite little place in silence. Angela was inclined to be amused; surely no one could have asked for a better opening than that afforded by the house. What would make him talk, she wondered, and what, oh what would he say? Something far, far more romantic than poor Matthew Henson could ever have dreamed of⁠—yes and far, far less romantic, something subconscious prompted her, than Anthony Cross had said. Anthony with his poverty and honour and desperate vows! + 

They had reached the grove, they had spread the rug and a tablecloth; Roger had covered it with dainties. He would not let her lift a finger, she was the guest and he her humble servant. She looked at him smiling, still forming vague contrasts with him and Matthew and Anthony. + 

Roger dropped his sandwich, came and sat behind her. He put his arm around her and shifted his shoulder so that her head lay against it. + 

“Don’t look at me that way Angèle, Angèle! I can’t stand it.” + 

So it was actually coming. “How do you want me to look at you?” + 

He bent his head down to hers and kissed her. “Like this, like this! Oh Angèle, did you like the house?” + 

“Like it? I loved it.” + 

“Darling, I had it done for you, you know. I thought you’d like it.” + 

It seemed a strange thing to have done without consulting her, and anyway she did not want to live in a suburb. Opal Street had been suburb enough for her. She wanted, required, the noise and tumult of cities. + 

“I don’t care for suburbs, Roger.” How strange for him to talk about a place to live in and never a word of love! + 

“My dear girl, you don’t have to live in a suburb if you don’t want to. I’ve got a place, an apartment in Seventy-second Street, seven rooms; that would be enough for you and your maid, wouldn’t it? I could have this furniture moved over there, or if you think it too cottagey, you could have new stuff altogether.” + 

Seven rooms for three people! Why she wanted a drawing-room and a studio and where would he put his things? This sudden stinginess was quite inexplicable. + 

“But Roger, seven rooms wouldn’t be big enough.” + 

He laughed indulgently, his face radiant with relief and triumph. “So she wants a palace, does she? Well, she shall have it. A whole ménage if you want it, a place on Riverside Drive, servants and a car. Only somehow I hadn’t thought of you as caring about that kind of thing. After that little hole in the wall you’ve been living in on Jayne Street I’d have expected you to find the place in Seventy-Second Street as large as you’d care for!” + 

A little hurt, she replied: “But I was thinking of you too. There wouldn’t be room for your things. And I thought you’d want to go on living in the style you’d been used to.” A sudden welcome explanation dawned on her rising fear. “Are you keeping this a secret from your father? Is that what’s the trouble?” + 

Under his thin, bright skin he flushed. “Keeping what a secret from my father? What are you talking about, Angèle?” + 

She countered with his own question. “What are you talking about, Roger?” + 

He tightened his arms about her, his voice stammered, his eyes were bright and watchful. “I’m asking you to live in my house, to live for me; to be my girl; to keep a love-nest where I and only I may come.” He smiled shamefacedly over the cheap current phrase. + 

She pushed him away from her; her jaw fallen and slack but her figure taut. Yet under her stunned bewilderment her mind was racing. So this was her castle, her fortress of protection, her refuge. And what answer should she make? Should she strike him across his eager, half-shamed face, should she get up and walk away, forbidding him to follow? Or should she stay and hear it out? Stay and find out what this man was really like; what depths were in him and, she supposed, in other men. But especially in this man with his boyish, gallant air and his face as guileless and as innocent apparently as her own. + 

That was what she hated in herself, she told that self fiercely, shut up with her own thoughts the next afternoon in her room. She hated herself for staying and listening. It had given him courage to talk and talk. But what she most hated had been the shrewdness, the practicality which lay beneath that resolve to hear it out. She had thought of those bills; she had thought of her poverty, of her helplessness, and she had thought too of Martha Burden’s dictum: “You must make him want you.” Well here was a way to make him want her and to turn that wanting to account. “Don’t,” Martha said, “withhold too much. Give a little.” Suppose she gave him just the encouragement of listening to him, of showing him that she did like him a little; while he meanwhile went on wanting, wanting⁠—men paid a big price for their desires. Her price would be marriage. It was a game, she knew, which women played all over the world although it had never occurred to her to play it; a dangerous game at which some women burned their fingers. “Don’t give too much,” said Martha, “for then you lose yourself.” Well, she would give nothing and she would not burn her fingers. Oh, it would be a great game. + 

Another element entered too. He had wounded her pride and he should salve it. And the only unguent possible would be a proposal of marriage. Oh if only she could be a girl in a book and when he finally did ask her for her hand, she would be able to tell him that she was going to marry someone else, someone twice as eligible, twice as handsome, twice as wealthy. + 

Through all these racing thoughts penetrated the sound of Roger’s voice, pleading, persuasive, seductive. She was amazed to find a certain shamefaced timidity creeping over her; yet it was he who should have shown the shame. And she could not understand either why she was unable to say plainly: “You say you care for me, long for me so much, why don’t you ask me to come to you in the ordinary way?” But some pride either unusually false or unusually fierce prevented her from doing this. Undoubtedly Roger with his wealth, his looks and his family connections had already been much sought after. He knew he was an “eligible.” Poor, unknown, stigmatized, if he but knew it, as a member of the country’s least recognized group she could not bring herself to belong even in appearance to that band of young women who so obviously seek a “good match.” + 

When he had paused a moment for breath she told him sadly: “But, Roger, people don’t do that kind of thing, not decent people.” + 

“Angèle, you are such a child! This is exactly the kind of thing people do do. And why not? Why must the world be let in on the relationships of men and women? Some of the sweetest unions in history have been of this kind.” + 

“For others perhaps, but not for me. Relationships of the kind you describe don’t exist among the people I know.” She was thinking of her parents, of the Hallowells, of the Hensons whose lives were indeed like open books. + 

He looked at her curiously, “The people you know! Don’t tell me you haven’t guessed about Paulette!” + 

She had forgotten about Paulette! “Yes I know about her. She told me herself. I like her, she’s been a mighty fine friend, but, Roger, you surely don’t want me to be like her.” + 

“Of course I don’t. It was precisely because you weren’t like her that I became interested. You were such a babe in the woods. Anyone could see you’d had no experience with men.” + 

This obvious lack of logic was too bewildering. She looked at him like the child which, in these matters, she really was. “But⁠—but Roger, mightn’t that be a beginning of a life like Paulette’s? What would become of me after we, you and I, had separated? Very often these things last only for a short time, don’t they?” + 

“Not necessarily; certainly not between you and me. And I’d always take care of you, you’d be provided for.” He could feel her gathering resentment. In desperation he played a cunning last card: “And besides who knows, something permanent may grow out of this. I’m not entirely my own master, Angèle.” + 

Undoubtedly he was referring to his father whom he could not afford to offend. It never occurred to her that he might be lying, for why should he? + 

To all his arguments, all his half-promises and implications she returned a steady negative. As twilight came on she expressed a desire to go home; with the sunset her strength failed her; she felt beaten and weary. Her unsettled future, her hurt pride, her sudden set-to with the realities of the society in which she had been moving, bewildered and frightened her. Resentful, puzzled, introspective, she had no further words for Roger; it was impossible for him to persuade her to agree or to disagree with his arguments. During the long ride home she was resolutely mute. + 

Yet on the instant of entering Jayne Street she felt she could not endure spending the long evening hours by herself and she did not want to be alone with Roger. She communicated this distaste to him. While not dishevelled they were not presentable enough to invade the hotels farther uptown. But, anxious to please her, he told her they could go easily enough to one of the small cabarets in the Village. A few turns and windings and they were before a house in a dark side street knocking on its absurdly barred door, entering its black, myterious portals. In a room with a highly polished floor, a few tables and chairs, some rather bizarre curtains, five or six couples were sitting, among them Paulette, Jack Hudson, a tall, rather big, extremely blonde girl whose name Angela learned was Carlotta Parks, and a slender, black-avised man whose name she failed to catch. Paulette hailed him uproariously; the blonde girl rose and precipitately threw her arms about Fielding’s neck. + 

“Roger!” + 

“Don’t,” he said rather crossly. “Hello, Jack.” He nodded to the dark man whom he seemed to know indifferently well. “What have they got to eat here, you fellows? Miss Mory and I are tired and hungry. We’ve been following the pike all day.” Miss Parks turned and gave Angela a long, considering look. + 

“Sit here,” said Paulette, “there’s plenty of room. Jack, you order for them, the same things we’ve been having. You get good cooking here.” She was radiant with happiness and content. Under the influence of the good, stimulating food Angela began to recover, to look around her. + 

Jack Hudson, a powerfully built bronze figure of a man, beamed on Paulette, saying nothing and in his silence saying everything. The dark man kept his eyes on Carlotta, who was oblivious to everyone but Roger, clearly her friend of long standing. She sat clasping one of his hands, her head almost upon his shoulder. “Roger it’s so good to see you again! I’ve thought of you so often! I’ve been meaning to write to you; we’re having a big house party this summer. You must come! Dad’s asking up half of Washington; attachés, ‘Prinzessen, Countessen and serene English Altessen’; he’ll come up for weekends.” + 

A member of the haut monde, evidently she was well-connected, powerful, even rich. A girl of Roger’s own set amusing herself in this curious company. Angela felt her heart contract with a sort of helpless jealousy. + 

The dark man, despairing of recapturing Carlotta’s attention, suddenly asked Angèle if she would care to dance. He was a superb partner and for a moment or two, reinvigorated by the food and the snappy music, she became absorbed in the smooth, gliding motion and in her partner’s pleasant conversation. Glancing over her shoulder she noted Carlotta still talking to Roger. The latter, however, was plainly paying the girl no attention. His eyes fixed on Angela, he was moodily following her every motion, almost straining, she thought, to catch her words. His eyes met hers and a long, long look passed between them so fraught, it seemed to her, with a secret understanding and sympathy, that her heart shook with a moment’s secret wavering. + 

Her partner escorted her back to the table. Paulette, flushed and radiant, with the mien of a dishevelled baby, was holding forth while Hudson listened delightedly. As a raconteuse she had a faint, delicious malice which usually made any recital of her adventures absolutely irresistible. “Her name,” she was saying loudly, regardless of possible listeners, “was Antoinette Spewer, and it seems she had it in for me from the very first. She told Sloane Corby she wanted to meet me and he invited both of us to lunch. When we got to the restaurant she was waiting for me in the lobby; Sloane introduced us and⁠—she pulled a lorgnette on me⁠—a lorgnette on me!” She said it very much as a Westerner might speak of someone “pulling” a revolver. “But I fixed that. There were three or four people passing near us. I drew back until they were well within hearing range, and then I said to her: ‘I beg pardon but what did you say your last name was?’ Well, when a person’s named Spewer she can’t shout it across a hotel lobby! Oh, she came climbing down off her high horse; she respects me to this day, I tell you.” + 

Roger rose. “We must be going; I can’t let Miss Mory get too tired.” He was all attention and courtesy. Miss Parks looked at her again, narrowing her eyes. + 

In the car Roger put his arm about her. “Angèle, when you were dancing with that fellow I couldn’t stand it! And then you looked at me⁠—oh such a look! You were thinking about me, I felt it, I knew it.” + 

Some treacherous barrier gave way within her. “Yes, and I could tell you were thinking about me.” + 

“Of course you could! And without a word! Oh, darling, darling, can’t you see that’s the way it would be? If you’d only take happiness with me there we would be with a secret bond, an invisible bond, existing for us alone and no one else in the world the wiser. But we should know and it would be all the sweeter for that secrecy.” + 

Unwittingly he struck a responsive chord within her⁠—stolen waters were the sweetest, she of all people knew that. + 

Aloud she said: “Here we are, Roger. Some of the day has been wonderful; thank you for that.” + 

“You can’t go like this! You’re going to let me see you again?” + 

She knew she should have refused him, but again some treacherous impulse made her assent. He drove away, and, turning, she climbed the long, steep flights of stairs, bemused, thrilled, frightened, curious, the sense of adventure strong upon her. Tomorrow she would see Jinny, her own sister, her own flesh and blood, one of her own people. Together they would thresh this thing out. + 

II + 

A curious period of duelling ensued. Roger was young, rich and idle. Nearly every wish he had ever known had been born within him only to be satisfied. He could not believe that he would fail in the pursuit of this baffling creature who had awakened within him an ardour and sincerity of feeling which surprised himself. The thought occurred to him more than once that it would have been a fine thing if this girl had been endowed with the name and standing and comparative wealth of⁠—say Carlotta Parks⁠—but it never occurred to him to thwart in this matter the wishes of his father who would, he knew, insist immediately on a certified account of the pedigree, training and general fitness of any strange aspirant for his son’s hand. Angela had had the good sense to be frank; she did not want to become immeshed in a tissue of lies whose relationship, whose sequence and interdependence she would be likely to forget. To Roger’s few questions she had said quite truly that she was the daughter of “poor but proud parents”;⁠—they had laughed at the hackneyed phrase⁠—that her father had been a boss carpenter and that she had been educated in the ordinary public schools and for a time had been a schoolteacher. No one would ever try to substantiate these statements, for clearly the person to whom they applied would not be falsifying such a simple account. There would be no point in so doing. Her little deceits had all been negative, she had merely neglected to say that she had a brown sister and that her father had been black. + 

Roger found her unfathomable. His was the careless, unreasoned cynicism of the modern, worldly young man. He had truly, as he acknowledged, been attracted to Angela because of a certain incurious innocence of hers apparent in her observations and in her manner. He saw no reason why he should cherish that innocence. If questioned he would have answered: “She’s got to learn about the world in which she lives sometime; she might just as well learn of it through me. And I’d always look out for her.” In the back of his mind, for all his unassuming even simple attitude toward his wealth and power, lurked the conviction that that same wealth and power could heal any wound, atone for any loss. Still there were times when even he experienced a faint, inner qualm, when Angela would ask him: “But afterwards, what would become of me, Roger?” It was the only question he could not meet. Out of all his hosts of precedents from historical Antony and Cleopatra down to notorious affinities discovered through blatant newspaper “stories” he could find for this only a stammered “There’s no need to worry about an afterwards, Angèle, for you and I would always be friends.” + 

Their frequent meetings now were little more than a trial of strength. Young will and determination were pitted against young will and determination. On both the excitement of the chase was strong, but each was pursuing a different quarry. To all his protestations, arguments and demands, Angela returned an insistent: “What you are asking is impossible.” Yet she either could not or would not drive him away, and gradually, though she had no intention of yielding to his wishes, her first attitude of shocked horror began to change. + 

For three months the conflict persisted. Roger interposed the discussion into every talk, on every occasion. Gradually it came to be the raison d’être of their constant comradeship. His arguments were varied and specious. “My dearest girl, think of a friendship in which two people would have every claim in the world upon each other and yet no claim. Think of giving all, not because you say to a minister ‘I will,’ but from the generosity of a powerful affection. That is the very essence of free love. I give you my word that the happiest couples in the world are those who love without visible bonds. Such people are bound by the most durable ties. Theirs is a state of the closest because the freest, most elastic union in the world.” + 

A singularly sweet and curious intimacy was growing up between them. Roger told Angela many anecdotes about his father and about his dead mother, whom he still loved, and for whom he even grieved in a pathetically boyish way. “She was so sweet to me, she loved me so. I’ll never forget her. It’s for her sake that I try to please my father, though Dad’s some pumpkins on his own account.” In turn she was falling into the habit of relating to him the little happenings of her everyday life, a life which she was beginning to realize must, in his eyes, mean the last word in the humdrum and the monotonous. And yet how full of adventure, of promise, even of mystery did it seem compared with Jinny’s! + 

Roger had much intimate knowledge of people and told her many and dangerous secrets. “See how I trust you, Angèle; you might trust me a little!” + 

If his stories were true, certainly she might just as well trust him a great deal, for all her little world, judging it by the standards by which she was used to measuring people, was tumbling in ruins at her feet. If this were the way people lived then what availed any ideals? The world was made to take pleasure in; one gained nothing by exercising simple virtue, it was after all an extension of the old formula which she had thought out for herself many years ago. Roger spent most of his time with her, it seemed. Anything which she undertook to do delighted him. She would accept no money, no valuable presents. “And I can’t keep going out with you to dinners and luncheons forever, Roger. It would be different if⁠—if we really meant anything to each other.” He deliberately misunderstood her, “But nothing would give me more pleasure than for us to mean the world to one another.” He sent her large hampers of fruit and even the more ordinary edibles; then he would tease her about being selfish. In order to get rid of the food she had asked him to lunch, to dinner, since nothing that she could say would make him desist from sending it. + 

Nothing gave her greater joy really than this playful housekeeping. She was very lonely; Jinny had her own happy interests; Anthony never came near her nor did she invite him to come; Martha Burden seemed engrossed in her own affairs, she was undergoing some secret strain that made her appear more remote, more strongly self-sufficient, more mysterious than ever. Paulette, making overt preparations to go to Russia with Hudson, was impossibly, hurtingly happy. Miss Powell⁠—but she could not get near her; the young coloured girl showed her the finest kind of courtesy, but it had about it a remote and frozen quality, unbreakable. However, Angela for the moment did not desire to break it; she must run no more risks with Roger, still she put Miss Powell on the list of those people whom she would some day aid⁠—when everything had turned out all right. + 

The result of this feeling of loneliness was, of course, to turn her more closely to Roger. He paid her the subtle compliment of appearing absolutely at home in her little apartment; he grew to like her plain, good cooking and the experiments which sometimes she made frankly for him. And afterwards as the fall closed in there were long, pleasant evenings before an open fire, or two or three last hours after a brisk spin in the park in the blue car. And gradually she had grown to accept and even inwardly to welcome his caresses. She perched with an air of great unconsciousness on the arm of the big chair in which he was sitting but the transition became constantly easier from the arm of the chair to his knee, to the steely embrace of his arm, to the sound of the hard beating of his heart, to his murmured: “This is where you belong, Angèle, Angèle.” He seemed an anchor for her frail insecure bark of life. + 

It was at moments like these that he told her amazing things about their few common acquaintances. There was not much to say about Paulette. “I think,” said Roger judicially, “that temperamentally she is a romantic adventurer. Something in her is constantly seeking a change but she will never be satisfied. She’s a good sport, she takes as she gives, asking nothing permanent and promising nothing permanent.” Angela thought it rather sad. But Roger dismissed the theme with the rather airy comment that there were women as there were men “like that.” She wondered if he might not be a trifle callous. + 

More than once they had spoken of Martha Burden; Angela confessed herself tremendously intrigued by the latter, by that tense, brooding personality. She learned that Martha, made of the stuff which dies for causes, was constantly being torn between theory and practice. + 

“She’s full,” said Roger, “of the most highfalutin, advanced ideas. Oh I’ve known old Martha all my life, we were brought up together, it’s through her really that I began to know the people in this part of town. She’s always been a sort of sister. More than once I’ve had to yank her by the shoulders out of difficulties which she herself created. I made her marry Starr.” + 

“Made her marry him⁠—didn’t she want him?” + 

“Yes, she wanted him all right, but she doesn’t believe in marriage. She’s got the courage of her convictions, that girl. Why actually she lived with Starr two years while I was away doing Europe. When I came back and found out what had happened I told Starr I’d beat him into pulp if he didn’t turn around and make good.” + 

“But why the violence? Didn’t he want to?” + 

“Yes, only,” he remembered suddenly his own hopes, “not every man is capable of appreciating a woman who breaks through the conventions for him. Some men mistake it for cheapness but others see it for what it is and love more deeply and gratefully.” Softly, lingeringly he touched the soft hair shadowing her averted cheek. “I’m one of those others, Angèle.” + 

She wanted to say: “But why shouldn’t we marry? Why not make me safe as well as Martha?” But again her pride intervened. Instead she remarked that Martha did not seem always happy. + 

“No, well that’s because she’s got this fool idea of hers that now that they are bound the spontaneity is lacking. She wants to give without being obliged to give; to take because she chooses and not because she’s supposed to. Oh she’s as true as steel and the best fighter in a cause, but I’ve no doubt but that she leads old Starr a life with her temperament.” + 

Angela thought that there were probably two sides to this possibility. A little breathlessly she asked Roger if he knew Anthony Cross. + 

“Cross, Cross! A sallow, rather thin fellow? I think I saw him once or twice at Paulette’s. No, I don’t really know him. A sullen, brooding sort of chap I should say. Frightfully self-absorbed and all that.” + 

For some reason a little resentment sprang up in her. Anthony might brood, but his life had been lived on dark, troublesome lines that invited brooding; he had never known the broad, golden highway of Roger’s existence. And anyway she did not believe, if Martha Burden had been Anthony’s lifelong friend, almost his sister, that he would have told his sweetheart or his wife either of those difficult passages in her life. Well, she would have to teach Roger many things. Aloud she spoke of Carlotta Parks. + 

“She’s an interesting type. Tell me about her.” + 

But Roger said rather shortly that there was nothing to tell. “Just a good-hearted, high-spirited kid, that’s all, who lets the whole world know her feelings.” + 

According to Paulette there was more than this to be told about Miss Parks. “I don’t know her myself, not being a member of that crowd. But I’ve always heard that she and Roger were childhood sweethearts, only they’ve just not pulled it off. Carlotta’s family is as old as his. Her people have always been statesmen, her father’s in the Senate. I don’t think they have much money now. But the main thing is she pleases old man Fielding. Nothing would give him more pleasure than to see Carlotta Roger’s wife. I may be mistaken, but I think nothing would give Carlotta more pleasure either.” + 

“Doesn’t he care for her?” Queer how her heart tightened, listening for the answer. + 

“Yes, but she likes him too much and shows it. So he thinks he doesn’t want her. Roger will never want any woman who comes at his first call. Don’t you hate that sort of man? They are really the easiest to catch; all you’ve got to do provided they’re attracted at all, is to give one inviting glance and then keep steadily retreating. And they’ll come⁠—like Bo Peep’s sheep. But I don’t want a man like that; he’d cramp my style. His impudence, expecting a woman to repress or evoke her emotions just as he wants them! Hasn’t a woman as much right to feel as a man and to feel first? Never mind, some woman is going to ‘get’ Roger yet. He doesn’t think it possible because he has wealth and position. He’ll be glad to come running to Carlotta then. I don’t care very much for her⁠—she’s a little too loud for me,” objected the demure and conservative Miss Lister, “but I do think she likes Roger for himself and not for what he can give her!” + 

Undoubtedly this bit of knowledge lent a new aspect; the adventure began to take on fresh interest. Everything seemed to be playing into her hands. Roger’s interest and longing were certainly undiminished. Martha Burden’s advice, confirmed by Paulette’s disclosure, was bound to bring results. She had only to “keep retreating.” + 

But there was one enemy with whom she had never thought to reckon, she had never counted on the treachery of the forces of nature; she had never dreamed of the unaccountable weakening of those forces within. Her weapons were those furnished by the conventions but her fight was against conditions; impulses, yearnings which antedated both those weapons and the conventions which furnished them. Insensibly she began to see in Roger something more than a golden way out of her material difficulties; he was becoming more than a means through which she should be admitted to the elect of the world for whom all things are made. Before her eyes he was changing to the one individual who was kindest, most thoughtful of her, the one whose presence brought warmth and assurance. Furthermore, his constant attention, flatteries and caresses were producing their inevitable effect. She was naturally cold; unlike Paulette, she was a woman who would experience the grand passion only once, perhaps twice, in her life and she would always have to be kindled from without; in the last analysis her purity was a matter not of morals, nor of religion, nor of racial pride; it was a matter of fastidiousness. Bit by bit Roger had forced his way closer and closer into the affairs of her life, and his proximity had not offended that fastidiousness. Gradually his demands seemed to her to represent a very natural and beautiful impulse; his arguments and illustrations began to bear fruit; the conventions instead of showing in her eyes as the codified wisdom based on the experiences of countless generations of men and women, seemed to her prudish and unnecessary. Finally her attitude reduced itself to this: she would have none of the relationship which Roger urged so insistently, not because according to all the training which she had ever received, it was unlawful, but because viewed in the light of the great battle which she was waging for pleasure, protection and power, it was inexpedient. + 

The summer and the early fall had passed. A cold, rainy autumn was closing in; the disagreeable weather made motoring almost impossible. There were always the theatres and the cabarets, but Roger professed himself as happy nowhere else but at her fireside. And she loved to have him there, tall and strong and beautiful, sometimes radiant with hope, at others sulking with the assurance of defeat. He came in one day ostensibly to have tea with her; he had an important engagement for the evening but he could not let the day pass without seeing her. Angela was tired and a little dispirited. Jinny had sold the house and had sent her twelve hundred dollars as her share, but the original three thousand was almost dissipated. She must not touch this new gift from heaven; her goal was no nearer; the unwelcome possibility of teaching, on the contrary, was constantly before her. Moreover, she was at last realising the danger of this constant proximity, she was appalled by her thoughts and longings. Upon her a great fear was creeping not only of Roger but of herself. + 

Always watchful, he quickly divined her distrait mood, resolved to try its possibilities for himself. In a tense silence they drank their tea and sat gazing at the leaping, golden flames. The sullen night closed in. Angela reminded him presently that he must go but on he sat and on. At eight o’clock she reminded him again; he took out his watch and looked at it indifferently. “It’s too late for me to keep it now, besides I don’t want to go. Angèle be kind, don’t send me away.” + 

“But you’ve had no dinner.” + 

“Nor you either. I’m like the beasts of the field keeping you like this. Shall we go out somewhere?” But she was languid; she did not want to stir from the warm hearth out into the chilly night. + 

“No, I don’t want to go. But you go, Roger. I can find something here in the house for myself, but there’s not a thing for you. I hate to be so inhospitable.” + 

“Tell you what, suppose I go around to one of these delicatessens and get something. Too tired to fix up a picnic lunch?” + 

In half an hour he returned, soaked. “It’s raining in torrents! Why I never saw such a night!” He shook himself, spattering raindrops all over the tiny apartment. + 

“Roger! You’ll have to take off your coat!” + 

He sat in his shirtsleeves before the fire, his hair curling and damp, his head on his hand. He looked so like a little boy that her heart shook within her. Turning he caught the expression in her eyes, sprang towards her. “Angèle you know, you know you like me a little!” + 

“I like you a very great deal.” He put his arm about her, kissed her; her very bones turned to water. She freed herself, finding an excuse to go into the kitchenette. But he came and stood towering over her in the doorway, his eyes on her every motion. They ate the meal, a good one, almost as silently as they had drunk the tea; a terrible awareness of each other’s presence was upon them, the air was charged with passion. Outside the rain and wind beat and screamed. + 

“It’s a terrible night,” she said, but he made no reply. She said again, “Roger, it’s getting late, you must go home.” Very reluctantly then, his eyes still on hers, he rose to his feet, got into his overcoat and, hat in hand, stooped to kiss her good night. His arm stole about her, holding her close against him. She could feel him trembling, she was trembling herself. Another second and the door had closed behind him. + 

Alone, she sat looking at the fire and thinking: “This is awful. I don’t believe anything is going to come of this. I believe I’ll send him a note tomorrow and tell him not to come any more.” + 

Someone tapped on the door; astonished that a caller should appear at such an hour, but not afraid, she opened it. It was Roger. He came striding into the room, flinging off his wet coat, and yet almost simultaneously catching her up in his arms. “It’s such a terrible night, Angèle; you can’t send me out in it. Why should I go when the fire is here and you, so warm and soft and sweet!” + 

All her strength left her; she could not even struggle, could not speak. He swept her up in his arms, cradling her in them like a baby with her face beneath his own. “You know that we were meant for each other, that we belong to each other!” + 

A terrible lassitude enveloped her out of which she heard herself panting: “Roger, Roger let me go! Oh, Roger, must it be like this? Can’t it be any other way?” + 

And from a great distance she heard his voice breaking, pleading, promising: “Everything will be all right, darling, darling. I swear it. Only trust me, trust me!” + 

Life rushed by on a great, surging tide. She could not tell whether she was utterly happy or utterly miserable. All that she could do was to feel; feel that she was Roger’s totally. Her whole being turned toward him as a flower to the sun. Without him life meant nothing; with him it was everything. For the time being she was nothing but emotion; he was amazed himself at the depth of feeling which he had aroused in her. + 

Now for the first time she felt possessive; she found herself deeply interested in Roger’s welfare because, she thought, he was hers and she could not endure having a possession whose qualities were unknown. She was not curious about his money nor his business affairs but she thirsted to know how his time away from her was spent, whom he saw, what other places he frequented. Not that she begrudged him a moment away from her side, but she must be able to account for that moment. + 

Yet if she felt possessive of him her feeling also recognized his complete absorption of her, so completely, so exhaustively did his life seem to envelop hers. For a while his wishes, his pleasure were the end and aim of her existence; she told herself with a slight tendency toward self-mockery that this was the explanation of being, of her being; that men had other aims, other uses but that the sole excuse for being a woman was to be just that⁠—a woman. Forgotten were her ideals about her Art; her ambition to hold a salon; her desire to help other people; even her intention of marrying in order to secure her future. Only something quite outside herself, something watchful, proud, remote from the passion and rapture which flamed within her, kept her free and independent. She would not accept money, she would not move to the apartment on Seventy-second Street; she still refused gifts so ornate that they were practically bribes. She made no explanations to Roger, but he knew and she knew too that her surrender was made out of the lavish fullness and generosity of her heart; there was no calculation back of it; if this were free love the freedom was the quality to be stressed rather than the emotion. + 

Sometimes, in her inchoate, wordless intensity of feeling which she took for happiness, she paused to take stock of that other life, those other lives which once she had known; that life which had been hers when she had first come to New York before she had gone to Cooper Union, in those days when she had patrolled Fourteenth Street and had sauntered through Union Square. And that other life which she knew in Opal Street⁠—aeons ago, almost in another existence. She passed easily over those first few months in New York because even then she had been approaching a threshold, getting ready to enter on a new, undreamed of phase of being. But sometimes at night she lay for hours thinking over her restless, yearning childhood, her fruitless days at the Academy, the abortive wooing of Matthew Henson. The Hensons, the Hallowells, Hetty Daniels⁠—Jinny! How far now she was beyond their pale! Before her rose the eager, starved face of Hetty Daniels; now she herself was cognizant of phases of life for which Hetty longed but so contemned. Angela could imagine the envy back of the tone in which Hetty, had she but known it, would have expressed her disapproval of her former charge’s manner of living. “Mattie Murray’s girl, Angela, has gone straight to the bad; she’s living a life of sin with some man in New York.” And then the final, blasting indictment. “He’s a white man, too. Can you beat that?” + 

III + 

Roger’s father, it appeared, had been greatly pleased with his son’s management of the sawmills in Georgia; as a result he was making more and more demands on his time. And the younger man half through pride, half through that steady determination never to offend his father, was always ready to do his bidding. Angela liked and appreciated her lover’s filial attitude, but even in the period of her warmest interest she resented, secretly despised, this tendency to dependence. He was young, superbly trained; he had the gift of forming friendships whose strength rested on his own personality, yet he distrusted too much his own powers or else he was lazy⁠—Angela could never determine which. During this phase of their acquaintanceship she was never sure that she loved him, but she was positive that if at this time he had been willing to fling aside his obsequious deference to his father’s money and had said to her: “Angèle, if you’ll help me, we’ll build up a life, a fortune of our own,” she would have adored him. + 

Her strong, independent nature, buffeted and sickened and strengthened by the constant attrition of colour prejudice, was unable to visualise or to pardon the frame of mind which kept Roger from joining battle with life when the odds were already so overwhelmingly in his favour. Alone, possessed of a handicap which if guessed at would have been as disabling as a game leg or an atrophied body, she had dared enter the lists. And she was well on the way to winning a victory. It was to cost her, she was beginning to realize, more than she had anticipated. But having entered she was not one to draw back⁠—unless indeed she changed her goal. Hers was a curious mixture of materialism and hedonism, and at this moment the latter quality was uppermost in her life. But she supposed that in some vague future she and Roger would marry. His ardour rendered her complacent. + 

But she was not conscious of any of these inner conflicts and criticisms; she was too happy. Now she was adopting a curious detachment toward life tempered by a faint cynicism⁠—a detachment which enabled her to say to herself: “Rules are for ordinary people but not for me.” She remembered a verse from a poet, a coloured woman about whom she had often wondered. The lines ran: + 

“The strong demand, contend, prevail. + 

The beggar is a fool!” + 

She would never be a beggar. She would ask no further counsel nor advice of anyone. She had been lucky thus far in seeking advice only from Paulette and Martha Burden, two people of markedly independent methods of thought and action. They had never held her back. Now she would no longer consult even them. She would live her life as an individualist, to suit herself without regard for the conventions and established ways of life. Her native fastidiousness, she was sure, would keep her from becoming an offence in her own eyes. + 

In spite of her increasing self-confidence and self-sufficiency Roger’s frequent absences left her lonely. Almost then, without any conscious planning on her part, she began to work at her art with growing vigour and interest. She was gaining in assurance; her technique showed an increased mastery, above all she had gained in the power to compose, a certain sympathy, a breadth of comprehension, the manifestation of that ability to interpret which she had long suspected lay within her, lent themselves to her hand. Mr. Paget, the instructor, spoke of her paintings with increased respect; the attention of visitors was directed thereto. Martha Burden and even Paulette, in the intervals of her ecstatic preparations, admitted her to the freemasonry of their own assured standing. Anthony Cross reminded her of the possibilities for American students at Fontainebleau. But she only smiled wisely; she would have no need of such study, but she hoped with all her heart that Miss Powell would be the recipient of a prize which would enable her to attend there. + 

“If she isn’t,” she promised herself, “I’ll make Roger give her her expenses. I’d be willing to take the money from him for that.” + 

To her great surprise her other interest besides her painting lay in visiting Jinny. If anyone had asked her if she were satisfied with her own life, her reply would have been an instant affirmative. But she did not want such a life for her sister. For Virginia there must be no risks, no secrets, no irregularities. Her efforts to find out how her sister spent her free hours amazed herself; their fruitlessness filled her with a constant irritation which Virginia showed no inclination to allay. The younger girl had passed her examination and had been appointed; she was a successful and enthusiastic teacher; this much Angela knew, but beyond this nothing. She gathered that Virginia spent a good deal of time with a happy, intelligent, rather independent group of young coloured men and women; there was talk occasionally of the theatre, of a dance, of small clubs, of hikes, of classes at Columbia or at New York City College. Angela even met a gay, laughing party, consisting of Virginia and her friends en route to Brooklyn, she had been later informed briefly. The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist’s eye noted, were gay, vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless. Angela began tardily to recognize that her sister had made her way into that curious, limited, yet shifting class of the “best” coloured people; the old Philadelphia phrase came drifting back to her, “people that you know.” She was amazed at some of the names which Virginia let drop from her lips in her infrequent and laconic descriptions of certain evenings which she had spent in the home of Van Meier, a great coloured American, a littérateur, a fearless and dauntless apostle of the rights of man; his name was known, Martha Burden had assured her, on both sides of the water. + 

Such information she picked up as best she might for Virginia vouchsafed nothing; nor did she, on the infrequent occasions on which she ran across her sister, even appear to know her. This Angela pointed out, was silly. “You might just as well speak,” she told Jinny petulantly, remembering uncomfortably the occasion when she herself had cut her sister, an absolute stranger in New York. “Plenty of white and coloured people are getting to know each other and they always acknowledge the acquaintanceship. Why shouldn’t we? No harm could come of it.” But in Virginia’s cool opinion no good could come of it either. Usually the younger girl preserved a discreet silence; whatever resolves she might have made with regard to the rupture between herself and her sister, she was certainly able to keep her own counsel. It was impossible to glean from her perfect, slightly distrait manner any glimpse of her inner life and her intentions. Frequently she showed an intense preoccupation from which she awakened to let fall a remark which revealed to Angela a young girl’s normal reactions to the life about her, pleasant, uneventful and tinged with a cool, serene happiness totally different from the hot, heady, turgid rapture which at present was Angela’s life. + 

The Jewish girl, Rachel Salting, who lived on the floor above, took to calling on Angela. “We’re young and here by ourselves,” she said smiling, “it’s stupid for us not to get acquainted, don’t you think so?” Hers was a charming smile and a charming manner. Indeed she was a very pretty girl, Angela thought critically. Her skin was very, very pale, almost pearly, her hair jet black and curling, her eyes large and almond-shaped. Her figure was straight and slender but bore none the less some faint hint of an exotic voluptuousness. Her interests, she informed her new friend, were all with the stage, her ideal being Raquel Meller. + 

Angela welcomed her friendliness. A strange apathy, an unusual experience for her, had invaded her being; her painting claimed, it is true, a great deal of time and concentration; her hours with Virginia, while not always satisfactory, were at least absorbing; but for the first time in her knowledge, her whole life was hanging on the words, the moods, the actions of someone else⁠—Roger. Without him she was quite lost; not only was she unable to order her days without him in mind, she was even unable to go in quest of new adventures in living as was once her wont. Consequently she received with outstretched arms anything beyond the ordinary which might break the threatening monotony of her life. + 

Rachel Salting was like a fresh breeze, a curious mixture of Jewish conservatism and modernity. Hers was a keen, clear mind, well trained in the New York schools and colleges with many branching interests. She spoke of psychiatry, housing problems, Zionism, child welfare, with a knowledge and zest which astounded Angela, whose training had been rather superficial and who had begun to adopt Paulette’s cleverness and Martha Burden’s slightly professional, didactic attitude toward things in general as norms for herself. Rachel, except when dwelling on the Jewish problem, seemed to have no particular views to set forth. Her discussions, based on her wide reading, were purely academic, she had no desire to proselyte, she was no reformer. She was merely a “nice,” rather jolly, healthy young woman, an onlooker at life which she had to get through with and which she was finding for the moment at any rate, extremely pleasant. + 

She was very happy; happy like Virginia with a happiness vastly different from what Angela was calling by that name; a breathless, constant, smiling happiness, palpable, transparent, for all the world to see. Within a few weeks after their acquaintanceship had started, Rachel with smiles and blushes revealed her great secret. She was going to be married. + 

“To the very best man in the world, Angèle.” + 

“Yes, I’m sure of it.” + 

“He’s very good-looking, tall⁠—” + 

“As though I didn’t know that.” + 

“How could you know?” + 

“Darling child, haven’t I seen him, at least the outline of him, often enough in the hall when I’d come in and turn on that wretched light? I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me for it. It did seem as though I were doing it on purpose.” + 

“Oh, I knew you weren’t. Then you have seen him?” + 

“Yes, he’s tall and blond. Quite a nice foil for your darkness. See, I’m always the artist.” + 

“Yes,” Rachel said slowly, “he is blond.” + 

Angela thought she detected a faint undertone of worry in her hitherto triumphant voice but decided that that was unlikely. + 

But Rachel confirmed this impression by her next words: “If only everything will turn out all right.” + 

Angel’s rather material mind prompted her to ask: “What’s the matter, is he very poor?” + 

Rachel stared. “Poor? As though that mattered. Yes, he’s poor, but I don’t care about that.” + 

“Well, if you don’t care about that, what’s the trouble then? He’s free, white and twenty-one, isn’t he?” + 

“Yes, yes, it’s only⁠—oh you wouldn’t understand, you lucky girl! It’s nothing you’d ever have to bother about. You see we’ve got to get our parents’ consent first. We haven’t spoken of it yet. When we do, I’m afraid there’ll be a row.” + 

Some ritual inherent in her racial connections, Angela decided, and asked no further questions. Indeed, she had small chance, for Rachel, once launched, had begun to expound her gospel of marriage. It was an old, old story. Angela could have closed her eyes and imagined her own mother rhapsodizing over her future with Junius. They would be poor, very poor at first but only at first, and they would not mind poverty a bit. It would be fun together. There were little frame houses in the Bronx that rented comparatively cheap. Perhaps Angela knew of them. + 

Angela shuddering inwardly, acknowledged that she had seen them, dull brown, high-shouldered affairs, perched perilously on stoops. The rooms would be small, square, ugly⁠— + 

Rachel would help her John in every way. They would economize. “I won’t wash and iron, for that is heartbreaking work, and I want to keep myself dainty and pretty for him, so that when we do become better off he won’t have to be ashamed of me. And all the time even in our hardest days I’ll be trying my luck at play-writing.” She spoke with the unquenchable ambition which was her racial dowry. “I’ll be attending lectures and sitting up in the galleries of theatres where they have the most successful plays. And some day I’ll land.” Her fanciful imagination carried her years ahead. “On our First Night, Angela, you must be in our box and I’ll have an ermine coat. Won’t it be wonderful? But nothing will be more wonderful than those first few years when we’ll be absolutely dependent on each other; I on what he makes, he on the way I run the home. That will be heaven.” + 

Confidences such as these left Angela unmoved but considerably shaken. There must be something in the life of sacrifice, even drudgery which Rachel had depicted. Else why should so many otherwise sensible girls take the risk? But there, it was silly for her to dwell on such pictures and scenes. Such a life would never come to her. It was impossible to conceive of such a life with Roger. Yet there were times in her lonely room when she pondered long and deeply, drawing pictures. The time would be summer; she would be wearing a white dress, would be standing in the doorway of a house in the suburbs very, very near New York. There’d be the best possible dinner on the table. She did love to cook. And a tall, strong figure would be hurrying up the walk: “I had the best luck today, Angèle, and I brought you a present.” And presently after dinner she would take him upstairs to her little workroom and she’d draw aside the curtain and show him a portrait of a well-known society woman. “She’s so pleased with it; and she’s going to get me lots of orders⁠—” Somehow she was absolutely sure that the fanciful figure was not Roger. + 

Her lover, back from a three weeks’ trip to Chicago, dissipated that sureness. He was glad, overwhelmingly glad to be back and to see Angèle. He came to her apartment directly from the train, not stopping even to report to his father. “I can see him tomorrow. Tonight is absolutely yours. What shall we do, Angèle? We can go out to dinner and the theatre or run out to the Country Club or stay here. What do you say?” + 

“We’ll have to stay here, Roger; I’ll fix up a gorgeous dinner, better than anything you’ve had to eat in any of your old hotels. But directly after, I’ll have to cut and run because I promised Martha Burden faithfully to go to a lecture with her tonight.” + 

“I never knew you to be interested in a lecture before.” + 

She was worried and showed it. “But this is a different sort of lecture. You know how crazy Martha is about race and social movements. Well, Van Meier is to speak tonight and Martha is determined that a lot of her friends shall hear him. I’m to go with her and Ladislas.” + 

“What’s to keep me from going?” + 

“Nothing, only he’s coloured, you know.” + 

“Well, I suppose it won’t rub off. I’ve heard of him. They say he really has brains. I’ve never seen a nigger with any yet; so this bids fair to be interesting. And, anyway, you don’t think I’m going to let my girl run off from me the very moment I come home, do you? Suppose I have Reynolds bring the big car here and we’ll take Martha and Ladislas along and anyone else she chooses to bring.” + 

The lecture was held in Harlem in East 135th Street. The hall was packed, teeming with suppressed excitement and a certain surcharged atmosphere. Angela radiant, calmed with the nearness and devotion of Roger, looked about her with keen, observing eyes. And again she sensed that fullness, richness, even thickness of life which she had felt on her first visit to Harlem. The stream of living ran almost molten; little waves of feeling played out from groups within the audience and beat against her consciousness and against that of her friends, only the latter were without her secret powers of interpretation. The occasion was clearly one of moment. “I’d come any distance to hear Van Meier speak,” said a thin-faced dark young man behind them. “He always has something to say and he doesn’t talk down to you. To hear him is like reading a classic, clear and beautiful and true.” + 

Angela, revelling in types and marshalling bits of information which she had got from Virginia, was able to divide the groups. There sat the most advanced coloured Americans, beautifully dressed, beautifully trained, whimsical, humorous, bitter, impatiently responsible, yet still responsible. In one section loomed the dark, eager faces of West Indians, the formation of their features so markedly different from that of the ordinary American as to give them a wild, slightly feral aspect. These had come not because they were disciples of Van Meier but because they were earnest seekers after truth. But unfortunately their earnestness was slightly marred by a stubbornness and an unwillingness to admit conviction. Three or four coloured Americans, tall, dark, sleek young men sat within earshot, speaking with a curious didactic precision. “They’re quoting all the sociologists in the world,” Ladislas Starr told his little group in astonishment. + 

Martha, with her usual thoroughness, knew all about them. They were the editors of a small magazine whose chief bid to fame lay in the articles which they directed monthly against Van Meier; articles written occasionally in a spirit of mean jealousy but usually in an effort to gain a sort of inverted glory by carrying that great name on its pages. + 

Here and there a sprinkling of white faces showed up plainly, startlingly distinct patterns against a background of patient, softly stolid black faces; faces beaten and fashioned by life into a mold of steady, rocklike endurance, of unshakable, unconquered faith. Angela had seen such faces before in the churches in Philadelphia; they brought back old pictures to her mind. + 

“There he is!” exclaimed Martha triumphantly. “That’s Van Meier! Isn’t he wonderful?” Angela saw a man, bronze, not very tall but built with a beautiful symmetrical completeness, cross the platform and sit in the tall, deep chair next to the table of the presiding officer. He sat with a curious immobility, gazing straight before him like a statue of an East Indian idol. And indeed there was about him some strange quality which made one think of the East; a completeness, a superb lack of self-consciousness, an odd, arresting beauty wrought by the perfection of his fine, straight nose and his broad, scholarly forehead. One look, however casual, gave the beholder the assurance that here indeed was a man, fearless, dauntless, the captain of his fate. + 

He began to speak on a clear, deep, bell-like note. Angela thought she had never heard its equal for beauty, for resonance, for culture. And as the young man had said he did not talk down. His English was the carefully sifted language of the savant, his periods polished, almost poetical. He was noted on two continents for his sociological and economic contributions, but his subject was racial sacrifice. He urged the deliberate introduction of beauty and pleasure into the difficult life of the American Negro. These objects should be theirs both as racial heritage and as compensation. Yet for a time, for a long time, there would have to be sacrifices, many sacrifices made for the good of the whole. “Our case is unique,” the beautiful, cultured voice intoned; “those of us who have forged forward, who have gained the front ranks in money and training, will not, are not able as yet to go our separate ways apart from the unwashed, untutored herd. We must still look back and render service to our less fortunate, weaker brethren. And the first step toward making this a workable attitude is the acquisition not so much of a racial love as a racial pride. A pride that enables us to find our own beautiful and praiseworthy, an intense chauvinism that is content with its own types, that finds completeness within its own group; that loves its own as the French love their country, because it is their own. Such a pride can accomplish the impossible.” He quoted: + 

“It is not courage, no, nor hate + 

That lets us do the things we do; + 

It’s pride that bids the heart be great⁠—” + 

He sat down to a surge of applause that shook the building. Dark, drooping faces took on an expression of ecstatic uplift, it was as though they suddenly saw themselves, transformed by racial pride as princes in a strange land in temporary serfdom, princes whose children would know freedom. + 

Martha Burden and Ladislas went up to speak to him; they were old friends. Angela, with Roger, visibly impressed, stood on one side and waited. Paulette and Hudson came pushing through the crowd, the former flushed and excited. Little groups of coloured people stood about, some deeply content with a sort of vicarious pride, some arguing; Angela caught sight of Virginia standing with three young men and two girls. They were for the most part gesticulating, lost in a great excitement. But Jinny seemed listless and aloof; her childish face looked thin and more forlornly young than ever. Anthony Cross and a tall man of undeniably Spanish type passed the little party and spoke to one of the men, received introductions. Presently Cross, swinging about, caught sight of Angela and Roger. He bowed hastily, flushing; caught his companion’s arm and walked hurriedly from the hall, his head very straight, his slender figure always so upright, so élancé, more erect than ever. + 

Presently Martha’s party was all out on the sidewalk; Roger in fine spirits invited Paulette and Hudson to ride down town in his car. Paulette was bubbling over with excited admiration of Van Meier. “He isn’t a man, he’s a god,” she proclaimed. “Did you ever see such a superb personality? He’s not a magnificent coloured man, he’s not ‘just as good as a white man’; he is a man, just that; colour, race, conditions in his case are pure accidents, he overrides them all with his ego. Made me feel like a worm too; I gave him my prettiest smile, grand white lady making up to an ‘exceptional Negro’ and he simply didn’t see me; took my hand⁠—I did my best to make my grasp a clinging one⁠—and he passed me right along disengaging himself as cool as a cucumber and making room for a lady of colour.” She finished reflectively, “I wonder what he would be like alone.” + 

“None of your nonsense, Paulette,” said Roger frowning. + 

Hudson smiled. “Paulette’s a mighty attractive little piece, I’ll admit, but I’d back Van Meier against her every time; she’d present no temptation to him; the man’s not only a prophet and the son of a prophet; he’s pride incarnate.” + 

Roger said meditatively, “I wonder what proportion of white blood he has in his veins. Of course that’s where he gets his ability.” + 

“You make me tired,” said Martha. “Of course he doesn’t get it from his white blood; he gets it from all his bloods. It’s the mixture that makes him what he is. Otherwise all white people would be gods. It’s the mixture and the endurance which he has learned from being coloured in America and the determination to see life without bitterness⁠—” + 

“Oh help, help,” exclaimed Roger. “No more lectures tonight. Look, you’re boring Angèle to death.” + 

“Nothing of the kind,” said Angela, “on the contrary I never was more interested in my life.” And reaching back she gave Martha’s hand a hearty squeeze. + 

Sometimes as on that first day at the art class, the five of them, Miss Powell, Paulette, Cross, Martha and Angela met before hours. Miss Powell as always was silent⁠—she came solely for her work⁠—but the others enjoyed a little preliminary chat. A week or so after the Van Meier lecture all but Paulette were gathered thus on an afternoon when she too came rushing in, starry eyed, flushed, consumed with laughter. + 

“I’ve played the biggest joke on myself,” she announced, “I’ve been to see Van Meier.” + 

Martha was instant attention. “A joke on Van Meier?” + 

“No, on myself, I tell you.” + 

It appeared that she had got Miss Powell to introduce her to one of the clerks in the great leader’s office. Paulettte then with deliberate intention had asked the girl to lunch and afterwards had returned with her to the office expressing a desire to meet her employer. Van Meier had received her cordially enough but with the warning that he was very busy. + 

“So I told him that I wouldn’t sit down, thinking of course he’d urge me to. But he just raised his eyebrows in the most quizzical way and said, ‘Well?’ + 

“Of course I couldn’t let matters rest like that so I sat down and began talking to him, nothing much you know, just telling him how wonderful he was and letting him see that I’d be glad to know him better. You should have seen him looking at me and not saying a word. Presently he reached out his hand and touched a bell and Miss Thing-um-bob came in⁠—your friend, you know, Miss Powell. He looked at her and nodding toward me said: ‘Take her away.’ I never felt such small potatoes in my life. I tell you he’s a personage. Wasn’t it great?” + 

Martha replied crossly that the whole thing seemed to her in dreadfully poor taste, while Miss Powell, after one incredulous stare at the first speaker, applied herself more sedulously to her work. Even Anthony, shocked out of his habitual moroseness pronounced the proceedings “a bit thick, Miss Lister.” Angela conscious of a swelling pride, stowed the incident away as a titbit for Virginia. + 

IV + 

Life had somehow come to a standstill; gone was its quality of high adventure and yet with the sense of tameness came no compensating note of assurance, of permanence. Angela pondered much about this; with her usual instinct for clarity, for a complete understanding of her own emotional life, she took to probing her inner consciousness. The fault, she decided, was bound up in her relationship with Roger. At present in a certain sense she might be said to be living for him; at least his was the figure about which her life resolved, revolved. Yet she no longer had the old, heady desire to feel herself completely his, to claim him as completely hers, neither for his wealth nor for the sense of security which he could afford nor for himself. For some reason he had lost his charm for her, much, she suspected, in the same way in which girls in the position which was hers, often lost their charm for their lovers. + 

And this realization instead of bringing to her a sense of relief, brought a certain real if somewhat fantastic shame. If there was to be no permanence in the relationship, if laying aside the question of marriage, it was to lack the dignity, the graciousness of an affair of long standing, of sympathy, of mutual need, then indeed according to the code of her childhood, according to every code of every phase of her development, she had allowed herself to drift into an inexcusably vulgar predicament. Even when her material safety and security were at stake and she had dreamed vaguely of yielding to Roger’s entreaties to ensure that safety and security, there might have been some excuse. Life, she considered, came before creed or code or convention. Or if she had loved and there had been no other way she might have argued for this as the supreme experience of her life. But she was no longer conscious of striving for marriage with Roger; and as for love⁠—she had known a feeling of gratitude, intense interest, even intense possessiveness for him but she did not believe she had ever known love. + 

But because of this mingling of shame and reproach she found herself consciously striving to keep their relations on the highest plane possible in the circumstances. She wished now not so much that she had never left Jinny and the security of their common home-life, as that the necessity for it had never arisen. Now suddenly she found herself lonely, she had been in New York nearly three years but not even yet had she struck down deep into the lode of genuine friendship. Paulette was kind and generous; she desired, she said, a close woman friend but Paulette was still the adventuress. She was as likely to change her vocation and her place of dwelling as she was to change her lover. Martha Burden, at once more stable and more comprehending in the conduct of a friendship once she had elected for it, was, on the other hand, much more conservative in the expenditure of that friendliness; besides she was by her very nature as reserved as Paulette was expansive, and her native intenseness made it difficult for her to dwell very long on the needs of anyone whose problems did not centre around her own extremely fixed ideas and principles. + 

As for Anthony Cross⁠—by some curious, utterly inexplicable revulsion of feeling, Angela could not bring herself to dwell long on the possibilities of a friendship with him. Somehow it seemed to her sacrilegious in her present condition to bring the memory of that far-off day in Van Cortlandt Park back to mind. As soon as his image arose she dismissed it, though there were moments when it was impossible for his vision to come before her without its instantly bringing to mind Rachel Salting’s notions of love and self-sacrifice. Well, such dreams were not for her, she told herself impatiently. For her own soul’s integrity she must make the most of this state in which she now found herself. Either she must effect through it a marriage whose excuse should be that of safety, assurance and a resulting usefulness; or she must resolve it by patience, steadfastness and affection into a very apotheosis of “free love.” Of all possible affaires du coeur this must in semblance at any rate, be the ultimate image desideration, the finest flower of chivalry and devotion. + 

To this end she began then devoting herself again to the renewal of that sense of possessiveness in Roger and his affairs which had once been so spontaneous within her. But to this Roger presented unexpected barriers; he grew restive under such manifestations; he who had once fought so bitterly against her indifference resented with equal bitterness any showing of possessive interest. He wanted no claims upon him, he acknowledged none. Gradually his absences, which at first were due to the business interests of his father, occurred for other reasons or for none at all. Angela could not grasp this all at once; it was impossible for her to conceive that kindness should create indifference; in spite of confirmatory stories which she had heard, of books which she had read, she could not make herself believe that devotion might sometimes beget ingratitude, loss of appreciation. For if that were so then a successful relationship between the sexes must depend wholly on the marriage tie without reference to compatibility of taste, training or ideals. This she could scarcely credit. In some way she must be at fault. + 

No young wife in the first ardour of marriage could have striven more than she to please Roger. She sought by reading and outside questions to inform herself along the lines of Roger’s training⁠—he was a mining engineer. His fondness for his father prompted her to numerous inquiries about the interest and pursuits of the older Fielding; she made suggestions for Roger’s leisure hours. But no matter how disinterested her attitude and tone his response to all this was an increased sullenness, remoteness, wariness. Roger was experienced in the wiles of women; such interest could mean only one thing⁠—marriage. Well, Angela might just as well learn that he had no thought, had never had any thought, of marrying her or any other woman so far removed from his father’s ideas and requirements. + 

Still Angela, intent on her ideals, could not comprehend. Things were not going well between them; affairs of this kind were often short-lived, that had been one of her first objections to the arrangement, but she had not dreamed that one withdrew when the other had committed no overt offence. She was as charming, as attractive, as pretty as she had ever been and far, far more kind and thoughtful. She had not changed, how could it be possible that he should be different? + 

A week had gone by and he had not dropped in to see her. Loneliness settled over her like a pall, frightening her seriously because she was realizing that this time she was not missing Roger so much as that a person for whom she had let slip the ideals engendered by her mother’s early teaching, a man for whom she had betrayed and estranged her sister, was passing out of her ken. She had rarely called him on the telephone but suddenly she started to do so. For three days the suave voice of his man, Reynolds, told her that Mr. Fielding was “out, m’m.” + 

“But did you give him my message? Did you ask him to call me as soon as he came in?” + 

“Yes, m’m.” + 

“And did he?” + 

“That I couldn’t tell you, m’m.” + 

She could not carry on such a conversation with a servant. + 

On the fifth day Roger appeared. She sprang toward him. “Oh Roger, I’m so glad to see you. Did Reynolds tell you I called? Why have you been so long coming?” + 

“I’d have been still longer if you hadn’t stopped phoning. Now see here, Angèle, this has got to stop. I can’t have women calling me up all hours of the day, making me ridiculous in the eyes of my servants. I don’t like it, it’s got to stop. Do you understand me?” + 

Surprised, bewildered, she could only stammer: “But you call me whenever you feel like it.” + 

“Of course I do, that’s different. I’m a man.” He added a cruel afterword. “Perhaps you notice that I don’t call you up as often as I used.” + 

Her pride was in arms. More than once she thought of writing him a brief note telling him that so far as she was concerned their “affair” was ended. But a great stubbornness possessed her; she was curious to see how this sort of thing could terminate; she was eager to learn if all the advice which older women pour into the ears of growing girls could be as true as it was trite. Was it a fact that the conventions were more important than the fundamental impulses of life, than generosity, kindness, unselfishness? For whatever her original motives, her actual relationship with Fielding had called out the most unselfish qualities in her. And she began to see the conventions, the rules that govern life, in a new light; she realized suddenly that for all their granite-like coldness and precision they also represented fundamental facts; a sort of concentrated compendium of the art of living and therefore as much to be observed and respected as warm, vital impulses. + 

Towards Roger she felt no rancour, only an apathy incapable of being dispersed. The conversation about the telephone left an effect all out of proportion to its actual importance; it represented for her the apparently unbridgeable difference between the sexes; everything was for men, but even the slightest privilege was to be denied to a woman unless the man chose to grant it. At least there were men who felt like that; not all men, she felt sure, could tolerate such an obviously unjust status. Without intent to punish, with no set purpose in her mind, simply because she was no longer interested, she began to neglect Roger. She no longer let other engagements go for him; she made no attempt to be punctual in keeping such engagements as they had already made; in his presence she was often absorbed, absentminded, lost in thought. She ceased asking him questions about his affairs. + 

Long before their quarrel they had accepted an invitation from Martha Burden to a small party. Angela was surprised that Roger should remember the occasion, but clearly he did; he was on hand at the correct date and hour and the two of them fared forth. During the brief journey he was courteous, even politely cordial, but the difference between his attitude and that of former days was very apparent. The party was of a more frivolous type than Martha usually sponsored, she was giving it for a young, fun-loving cousin of Ladislas; there was no general conversation, some singing, much dancing, much pairing off in couples. Carlotta Parks was present with Ralph Ashley, the slender, dark man who had appeared with Carlotta when Angela first met her. As soon as Roger appeared Carlotta came rushing toward him. + 

“I’ve been waiting for you!” She dragged at his hand and not unwillingly he suffered himself to be led to a small sofa. They chatted a few minutes; then danced; Roger simply must look at Martha’s new etchings. The pair was inseparable for the evening. Try as she might Angela could discover no feeling of jealousy but her dignity was hurt. She could not have received less attention from her former lover if they had never met. At first she thought she would make up to Ashley but something malicious in Carlotta’s glance deterred her. No, she was sick of men and their babyish, faithless ways; she did not care enough about Roger to play a game for him. So she sat quietly in a deep chair, smoking, dipping into the scattered piles of books which lent the apartment its air of cheerful disorder. Occasionally she chatted; Ladislas Starr perched on the arm of her chair and beguiled her with gay tales of his university days in prewar Vienna. + 

But she would never endure such an indignity again. On the way home she was silent. Roger glanced at her curiously, raised his eyebrows when she asked him to come in. She began quietly: “Roger I’ll never endure again the treatment⁠—” + 

But he was ready, even eager for a quarrel. “It looks to me as though you were willing to endure anything. No woman with an ounce of pride would have stood for what you’ve been standing lately.” + 

She said evenly: “You mean this is the end? We’re through?” + 

“Well, what do you think about it? You certainly didn’t expect it to last forever.” + 

His tone was unbelievably insulting. Eyeing him speculatively she replied: “No, of course I didn’t expect it to last forever, but I didn’t think it would end like this. I don’t see yet why it should.” + 

The knowledge of his unpardonable manner lay heavy upon him, drove him to fresh indignity. “I suppose you thought some day I’d kiss your hand and say ‘You’ve been very nice to me; I’ll always remember you with affection and gratitude. Goodbye.’ ” + 

“Well, why shouldn’t you have said that? Certainly I’d expected that much sooner than a scene of this sort. I never dreamed of letting myself in for this kind of thing.” + 

Some ugly devil held him in its grasp. “You knew perfectly well what you were letting yourself in for. Any woman would know it.” + 

She could only stare at him, his words echoing in her ears: “You knew perfectly well what you were letting yourself in for.” + 

The phrase had the quality of a cosmic echo; perhaps men had been saying it to women since the beginning of time. Doubtless their biblical equivalent were the last words uttered by Abraham to Hagar before she fared forth into the wilderness. + 

V + 

Long after Roger had left her she sat staring into the dark shadows of the room. For a long time the end, she knew, had been imminent; she had been curious to see how it would arrive, but the thought had never crossed her mind that it would come with harsh words and with vulgarity. The departure of Roger himself⁠—she shut her hand and opened it⁠—meant nothing; she had never loved, never felt for him one-tenth of the devotion which her mother had known for her father, of the spontaneous affection which Virginia had offered Matthew Henson. Even in these latter weeks when she had consciously striven to show him every possible kindness and attention she had done so for the selfish preservation of her ideals. Now she looked back on those first days of delight when his emotions and her own had met at full tide; when she dreamed that she alone of all people in the world was exempt from ordinary law. How, she wondered futilely, could she ever have suffered herself to be persuaded to tamper with the sacred mysteries of life? If she had held in her hand the golden key⁠—love! But to throw aside the fundamental laws of civilization for passion, for the hotheaded wilfulness of youth and to have it end like this, drably, vulgarly, almost in a brawl! How could she endure herself? And Roger and his promises of esteem and golden memories! + 

For a moment she hated him for his fine words and phrases, hated him for tricking her. No matter what she had said, how she had acted, he should have let her go. Better a wound to her passion than later this terrible gash in her proud assurance, this hurt in the core of herself. “God!” she said, raging in her tiny apartment as a tiger in a menagerie rages in its inadequate cage, “God, isn’t there any place where man’s responsibility to woman begins?” + 

But she had grown too much into the habit of deliberately ordering her life, of hewing her own path, of removing the difficulties that beset that path, to let herself be sickened, utterly prostrated by what had befallen her. Roger, her companion, had gone; she had been caught up in an inexcusably needless affair without the pretext of love. Thank God she had taken nothing from Roger; she had not sold herself; only bestowed that self foolishly, unworthily. However upset and harassed her mind might be it could not dwell too long on this loss of a lover. There were other problems to consider; for Roger’s passing meant the vanishing of the last hope of the successful marriage which once she had so greatly craved. And even though she had not actively considered this for some time, yet as a remote possibility it had afforded a sense of security. Now that mirage was dispelled; she was brought with a sudden shock back to reality. No longer was it enough for her to plan how she could win to a pleasant and happy means of existence, she must be on the qui vive for the maintenance of that very existence itself. New York had literally swallowed her original three thousand dollars; part of Virginia’s gift was also dissipated. Less than a thousand dollars stood between her and absolute penury. She could not envisage turning to Jinny; life which had seemed so promising, so golden, had failed to supply her with a single friend to whom she could turn in an hour of extremity. + 

Such thoughts as these left her panic-stricken, cold with fear. The spectre of possible want filled her dreams, haunted her waking hours, thrust aside the devastating shame of her affair with Roger to replace it with dread and apprehension. In her despair she turned more ardently than ever to her painting; already she was capable of doing outstanding work in portraiture, but she lacked cachet; she was absolutely unknown. + 

This condition of her mind affected her appearance; she began to husband her clothes, sadly conscious that she could not tell where others would come from. Her face lost its roundness, the white warmness of her skin remained but there were violet shadows under her eyes; her forehead showed faint lines; she was slightly shabby. Gradually the triumphant vividness so characteristic of Angèle Mory left her, she was like any one of a thousand other pitiful, frightened girls thronging New York. Miss Powell glanced at her and thought: “she looks unhappy, but how can she be when she has a chance at everything in the world just because she’s white?” + 

Anthony marked her fading brightness; he would have liked to question her, comfort her, but where this girl was concerned the role of comforter was not for him. Only the instructor, Mr. Paget guessed at her extremity. He had seen too many students not to recognize the signs of poverty, of disaster in love, of despair at the tardy flowering of dexterity that had been mistaken for talent. Once after class he stopped Angela and asked her if she knew of anyone willing to furnish designs for a well-known journal of fashion. + 

“Not very stimulating work, but the pay is good and the firm reliable. Their last artist was with them eight years. If you know of anyone⁠—” + 

She interrupted: “I know of myself. Do you think they’d take me on?” + 

“I could recommend you. They applied to me, you see. Doubtless they’d take my suggestions into account.” + 

He was very kind; made all the necessary arrangements. The firm received Angela gladly, offering her a fair salary for work that was a trifle narrow, a bit stultifying. But it opened up possibilities; there were new people to be met; perhaps she would make new friends, form ties which might be lasting. + 

“Oh,” she said hopefully to herself, “life is wonderful! It’s giving me a new deal and I’ll begin all over again. I’m young and now I’m sophisticated; the world is wide, somewhere there’s happiness and peace and a place for me. I’ll find it.” + 

But her hope, her sanguineness, were a little forced, her superb self-confidence perceptibly diminished. The radiance which once had so bathed every moment of her existence was fading gently, inexorably into the “light of common day.” + 