Now the Marshall boys were fine gentlemen. Joel had made them so by teaching, as well as by his attitude toward their mother and sisters. Joanna and Sylvia, particularly Sylvia, helped the boys out with an occasional stitch, an occasional sewing on of a button. When Alexander was getting ready for college, and was working at nights to help with his expenses, Sylvia used to arrange sandwiches and milk for him when he came in late. And Joanna had recopied his chemistry and history notes. These were only kind trivialities, but the boys treated their sisters like queens. Philip was a little like Sylvia, only neither as handsome nor as lithe and quick. Alexander—Alec, Sandy, the girls called him variously—was slower, like Joanna. Both boys were tall and well set-up. The girls used to thrill a little—sisters to them though they were—over the very real and thoughtful gallantry of these two young men.
Miss Susan had remarked this quality as soon as she met them. And she was beginning now to see its reflection in Peter. And as he had beauty and great personal charm to go with it, it distinguished him even more than the Marshall boys. She halfway suspected a conscious assumption of this on his part.
“But if he keeps it up, it will become part of him,” she thought to herself, “and then—girls be careful.” She would have been a little fearful for Joanna had she not noticed immediately in the young girl that indomitable desire for distinction. “Joanna will never fall in love with anybody,” she said once to a common friend of herself and the Marshalls. “She’ll never be able to take her mind off long enough from her highfalutin dreams.”
Of course Peter had no conception why his aunt liked him to visit the Marshalls. He was only too glad that she didn’t disapprove. He was seventeen now and beginning to know himself in some ways pretty well. He liked Sandy and Philip and Sylvia Marshall—liked them very well, and Joanna! It could hardly be said that he loved her at this time. But he knew that what he liked best of all in the world was to be near her, to watch her, and to listen to her plans. She had little shadowy gleams in her dark thick hair, glints of light that ended abruptly in wavy blackness. He would like to touch it. He remembered that he had once pulled her hair. He had done it often! But now, though she was only fifteen, he did not dare. Yet he often touched Sylvia’s.
The night that Joanna taught them all the barn dance, Peter maneuvered until he got Harry Portor at the piano, and said:
“How does that part go, Joanna? Here I am in the center. Then I take you in. Then—”
“Put your arms around her,” said Sylvia. “That’s it. Now—
Barn! Barn!”
He went home and fairly babbled to his aunt about it. “Joanna is the most wonderful!”
VIII
If Peter was unconscious of the utter desirability of association with the young Marshalls, Maggie Ellersley was not. Ever since her childhood when she had overheard a conversation between a cousin and her mother, she had made up her mind to attach herself to some such family and see what came of it.
The cousin and her mother worked together for some wealthy white people. Maggie’s mother was a laundress, a spare hardworking woman to whom life had meant nothing but poverty and confusion. On Thursdays and Fridays of each week she washed and ironed and gossiped with “my cousin Mis’ Sparrow” who was cook at the house on Madison Avenue. Maggie used to come there for dinner and go home with her mother.
“Mis’ Sparrow,” small and spidery, had a perpetual complaint against the world. In particular she experienced envy toward those who were better off than herself. Her jaundiced disposition may be excused, however, when one reflects that hers was a lot which had been hard ever since she could remember. She was poor, she was weak, she was ignorant. Add to that the fact that she was black in a country where color is a crime and you have her “complex.” Some people would say she had really done well in one sense with her life. She had attained by her own unaided efforts to a comfortable, even if menial, position, where she had heat, light and enough to eat. They would ask: Considering her beginnings what more could she want? Alas, in that dull soul unknown aspirations stirred, amazing questions took form. “Why, why, why?” asked Mis’ Sparrow in her own peculiar dialect, “are all the sweetness and light of life showered on some and utterly denied to me?”
At present Mis’ Sparrow had fastened a resentful eye on Mrs. Proctor, the bride of the son of the “white folks” for whom she worked. Edmonia the maid had told her about the newcomer, and over the supper table she retailed it to Mrs. Ellersley.
“She wan’t nobuddy. Jes’ a little teeny slip of ole white gal. No money, no fambly, no nuthin’.”
“Where’d he meet her then?” asked Mrs. Ellersley, uninterested but polite.
“Young Mr. Proctor’s sister met her in boardin’-school, poorest thing there,” replied Mis’ Sparrow, wiping a puckered mouth with her apron. “ ’Monia says Miss Dorothy sorry for her and got her a job in her father’s office. Mr. Harry was jes’ home f’um college; he saw her, took a fancy to her and jes’ married her. Jes’ wouldn’t listen to nobuddy a-tall.”
“Don’t it beat all,” pondered Mrs. Ellersley, “how some people have all the luck? Now if that kind of thing could just happen to my Maggie.”
Mis’ Sparrow was unmoved by the irrelevant allusion to Maggie. Where would she get such a chance?
“ ’Monia says she don’t even love him. Liked some young travelin’ salesman she’d known all her life. ’Monia declares she cries about him when she’s by herself.”
“What she marry him for then?” asked Maggie Ellersley, aged twelve, and
