Turning from the window, her gaze wandered contemptuously over the dull attire of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly navy blue, black, brown, unrelieved, save for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks. Fragments of a speech made by the dean of women floated through her thoughts—“Bright colors are vulgar”—“Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people”—“Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow, or green or red.”—The dean was a woman from one of the “first families”—a great “race” woman; she, Helga Crane, a despised mulatto, but something intuitive, some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness told her that bright colours were fitting and that dark-complexioned people should wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress, which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she wondered, didn’t someone write A Plea for Color?
These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destruction.
She came back to her own problems. Clothes had been one of her difficulties in Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate ones. Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend. But with small success, for, although she had affected the deceptively simple variety, the hawk eyes of dean and matrons had detected the subtle difference from their own irreproachably conventional garments. Too, they felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft, luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks. And the trimmings—when Helga used them at all—seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange embroideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim shoes made them uncomfortable and her small plain hats seemed to them positively indecent. Helga smiled inwardly at the thought that whenever there was an evening affair for the faculty, the dear ladies probably held their breaths until she had made her appearance. They existed in constant fear that she might turn out in an evening dress. The proper evening wear in Naxos was afternoon attire. And one could, if one wished, garnish the hair with flowers.
Quick, muted footfalls sounded. The secretary had returned.
“Dr. Anderson will see you now, Miss Crane.”
She rose, followed, and was ushered into the guarded sanctum, without having decided just what she was to say. For a moment she felt behind her the open doorway and then the gentle impact of its closing. Before her at a great desk her eyes picked out the figure of a man, at first blurred slightly in outline in that dimmer light. At his “Miss Crane?” her lips formed for speech, but no sound came. She was aware of inward confusion. For her the situation seemed charged, unaccountably, with strangeness and something very like hysteria. An almost overpowering desire to laugh seized her. Then, miraculously, a complete ease, such as she had never known in Naxos, possessed her. She smiled, nodded in answer to his questioning salutation, and with a gracious “Thank you” dropped into the chair which he indicated. She looked at him frankly now, this man still young, thirty-five perhaps, and found it easy to go on in the vein of a simple statement.
“Dr. Anderson, I’m sorry to have to confess that I’ve failed in my job here. I’ve made up my mind to leave. Today.”
A short, almost imperceptible silence, then a deep voice of peculiarly pleasing resonance, asking gently: “You don’t like Naxos, Miss Crane?”
She evaded. “Naxos, the place? Yes, I like it. Who wouldn’t like it? It’s so beautiful. But I—well—I don’t seem to fit here.”
The man smiled, just a little. “The school? You don’t like the school?”
The words burst from her. “No, I don’t like it. I hate it!”
“Why?” The question was detached, too detached.
In the girl blazed a desire to wound. There he sat, staring dreamily out of the window, blatantly unconcerned with her or her answer. Well, she’d tell him. She pronounced each word with deliberate slowness.
“Well, for one thing, I hate hypocrisy. I hate cruelty to students, and to teachers who can’t fight back. I hate backbiting, and sneaking, and petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending his time in a malicious hunting for the weaknesses of others, spying, grudging, scratching.”
“I see. And you don’t think it might help to cure us, to have someone who doesn’t approve of these things stay with us? Even just one person, Miss Crane?”
She wondered if this last was irony. She suspected it was humor and so ignored the half-pleading note in his voice.
“No, I don’t! It doesn’t do the disease any good. Only irritates it. And it makes me unhappy, dissatisfied. It isn’t pleasant to be always made to appear in the wrong, even when I know I’m right.”
His gaze was on her now, searching. “Queer,” she thought, “how some brown people have gray eyes. Gives them a strange, unexpected appearance. A little frightening.”
The man said, kindly: “Ah, you’re unhappy. And for the reasons you’ve stated?”
“Yes, partly. Then, too, the people here don’t like me. They don’t think I’m in the spirit of the work. And I’m not, not if it means suppression of individuality and beauty.”
“And does it?”
“Well, it seems to work out that way.”
“How old are you, Miss Crane?”
She resented this, but she told him, speaking
