“Now, Maggie, dance up to one of them. All right, take Philip. You point your finger at him—no both of you. Yes, you’re right, Peter. I forgot that. See, Phil, Peter’s learned it already. Here I’ll do it by myself; all of you stand back.”
She went through an elaborate pantomime, stretching out her hands as though clasping a partner on each side. She described an imaginary circle for the ring and ran into the midst of it. An imaginary partner was before her and she drew him in, pointed a slim, brown finger at him, rested both hands on her young hips, pirouetted, sang to him gayly:
“Stand back, boy, don’t you come near me!”
“My,” laughed Brian Spencer, clapping loudly. “Can’t you see it all just as plainly? Really, Jan, you ought to go on the stage as an impersonator, I don’t believe you could be beat.” He was a tall dark boy with fine proud features that looked chiseled. He and Alexander were home from college for the Easter vacation.
Maggie Ellersley, as it happened, had been at a matinée the week before. “It was vaudeville, Joanna, and there was an actress there who took off different people and then she did some Irish folk dances, but she couldn’t hold a candle to you. Too bad we’re colored.”
“It’s not going to make any difference to me,” said Joanna determinedly. “Mother and father are willing. If I want to go on the stage I’ll get there.”
“Joanna has the faith that moves mountains,” laughed Peter. “If anybody can make it she can.”
Peter was a regular visitor at the Marshall home now. Ever since that day four years before when he had told Joanna of his newborn determination to be a surgeon, he had spent all his spare time near her. Miss Susan Graves did not like this at first, not that she resented Peter’s absence from her so much, but he was a Bye and she did not choose to have him associate too much with people whom she did not know. It was no part of her plan for Peter to retrograde into the wreck which Meriwether had become. She made it her business to meet Mrs. Marshall at a church affair.
“I think,” said Miss Graves, eyeing Joanna’s mother with her clear, square gaze, “that my boy has spoken to me of you.”
Mrs. Marshall looked puzzled. She thought this was a Miss Graves.
“Peter Bye,” his aunt continued, “he’s my nephew. He often speaks of Joanna Marshall.”
“Oh, Peter! Yes, we like to have him at the house. The girls find him great fun. So you’re his aunt. You must come to see us, too. Get him to bring you.”
Miss Graves came and was impressed enough to let Peter continue, though he would have continued without her permission. But Miss Susan, like Belle Bye nearly a century ago, recognized atmosphere when she saw it. She was poor; Peter was penniless. These were the sort of people her nephew ought to know. She liked Joel’s success, his pride, his air of being somebody. She estimated rightly the correctness of the old-fashioned walnut furniture, the heavy curtains, the kidney table in the parlor, the massive silver service and good linen. It is true Sylvia changed much of this—except the silver—for cretonnes and wicker chairs and gay rugs. But as Miss Susan went to the house only a few times she did not know of this.
What she especially liked was the spirit of life, of ambition and hopefulness that pulsed in that household. As Miss Graves grew older, she began to see that her younger sister had had some pretty good views after all, that it did not do to stick to settled views—“this for me, and that quite other thing for you.” The great things of life were for the taking, it was true, but the result of deliberate planning. One did not simply stumble into success. She had lived too long with “the best white people” not to find that out.
Joel knew this, too, she realized. His whole life was devoted to the mapping out of his children’s future. His own and Joanna’s high enthusiasms had borne fruit. Of late the boys, Philip and Alexander, had talked good solid man-talk.
“Colored people will be going big pretty soon. We’ll have to get in it, too, Pa.”
Miss Susan decided this was a good place for Peter. Even if she had the money to do so, she could not send him to a school where he would meet with more inspiration in both precept and actual concrete example. Already in the lesser things this association was bearing fruit. Peter was too handsome, too graceful, too charming ever to be considered a boor. But he had lacked finish, that fine courtliness of manner which Miss Susan noted could convert a man of most ordinary appearance into a prince. She had marked it among Jacob Sharples’ grandsons. Peter had not possessed a knowledge of that delicacy, of that attention to trifles which, once gained by a man, gives him passport everywhere. Miss Susan had noticed, to her regret, the boy’s tendency to let her carry bundles, to look after even the heavier household duties. It had never occurred to him if the weather were cold or stormy, to offer to go errands for her. And his aunt, practical though she was, shrank from calling his attention to these things. She did not want him to think of her as exacting a return for
