“Sylvia’s my sister, thank you. She’s Joel Marshall’s daughter. She has background, she knows good music and pictures and worth while people.”
“You talk like a silly book. What’s that got to do with it? And, anyway, you can’t stop it now.”
“What’s the reason I can’t?”
“Well, good Lord, it must be as good as settled. Why Maggie thinks—only today—Oh—here, I’ve said enough. Thanks awfully for a nice evening, Jan—”
“What’d she say, Brian?”
“Well, you know we were coming home from church and you and Bye were ahead and I said, ‘Look at the lucky pair.’ ”
“Yes, never mind me. Well, well?”
“And she said, ‘You miss Sylvia, don’t you, Brian?’ ‘You bet,’ I told her.
“And she looked at me—you know how Maggie can look—she said, ‘Just like I miss Philip, I guess.’ ”
Joanna grew visibly taller. “You let her say that, Brian Spencer?”
“Well, how could I stop her? Of course she misses Phil. And quit acting ‘offended pride,’ Joanna. Heavens, doesn’t Sylvia sometimes do sewing?”
“Oh, but that’s different, she creates, she’s an artist—”
“Artist your grandmother! Sleep it off, Janna. Good night.” He went off, striding down the quiet street.
Joanna closed the door and crept quietly up to her room. Seated in a wicker armchair in a stream of gold summer moonlight, she spent a long time in deep thought.
Maggie and Philip! Maggie! Of late she and Philip had had many a long talk. He’d lean against the mantelpiece—his restless fingers caressing a little black statuette:
“Jan, I’ll talk to you, because you’ve always cared about this kind of thing. Raise a monument—more-enduring-than-bronze sort of business, you know. When I graduate—by the way, I think I’ll be elected Phi Beta Kappa next year—I’ve got a scheme, I’ve got a plan that will work all right. Father will be proud of me, you’ll see. And you, too, old girl, you’ve always been a bright beacon light. You stick to this stage business, you’ll win out. There’ll be a twin star constellation. ‘The well known Marshalls, Joanna and Philip.’ We’ll make the whole world realize what colored people can do. Nothing short of ‘battle, murder or sudden death’ is to interfere.”
He, too, had been bitten by the desire to make the most of his life. And now here was Maggie Ellersley.
“What ambition has she?” Joanna asked herself fiercely, forgetting to measure the depth of the abyss of poverty and wretchedness from which Maggie had sprung. “She shan’t spoil my brother’s chances.”
Rushing over to her little desk, she pulled out a piece of tan stationery and began a note.
“Dear Maggie—”
XI
Peter had accompanied Maggie as far as the subway station. “You won’t mind if I don’t go all the way home with you, Maggie? Fact is, I don’t feel so well today, so if you’ll excuse me—” His voice trailed indeterminately.
Maggie smiled at him nicely. She was oddly happy at this moment. Linking her name with Philip’s, as she had, gave her an odd sense of freedom, of sureness. “And Brian didn’t seem at all surprised,” she kept thinking to herself over and over.
She answered out loud, “That’s all right, Peter. Go home and rest. I’m going to be in the house only a minute, anyway.” She looked at him meaningly. “I guess both of us have a lot to think of. Goodbye.” She flashed down the steps, looked back; a second later a slender golden hand waved to him from the gloom of the subway.
“Now I don’t know what she meant,” thought Peter, pushing his hat back from his hot forehead, and immediately turning to another idea. “I’d like to punch that fresh Brian’s head. Oh, Janna, how could you go off with him?”
Down in the subway train Maggie sat smiling a little inanely. Of late, her feeling for Philip had taken a definite form; she wanted, as always, desperately to marry, and to marry well in order to secure for herself the decent respectability for which those first arid fourteen years of her life had created an almost morbid obsession. But she knew now that the one man through whom she wanted to secure that respectability was Philip Marshall. She loved him.
“If the way I wanted him at first, dear God, was a sin, you must forgive me. Oh, Philip, Philip, have a good time in Philadelphia today. I bet you’re at a meeting of some kind this minute.” The picture of his favorite attitude came before her, and she smiled more broadly.
A white man sitting opposite mistook the smile and leaned forward, leering a little. She turned her head quickly, noting as she did so that something about his build made her think of Henderson Neal, her mother’s roomer.
She was to go motoring with him this afternoon. He had asked her very often of late. Usually she spent Sundays with Philip and Sylvia and Brian, sometimes with Joanna and Peter. But since the first two were away, she might just as well spend the time with Mr. Henderson. He would have a nice car, she knew; twice before he had taken herself and her mother out. It had really been very nice. She rather fancied he must work in a garage, he came riding up to the house so often. She wished a little nervously that she hadn’t promised to go, it would be nice to sit quietly in her room or in the long, sparsely furnished parlor and think.
Still it was hot, and if there were any air to be got they’d catch it in an automobile.
She ran up the subway steps and hurried toward Fifty-third Street. Somehow she didn’t care to keep Mr. Neal waiting.
There was still a quarter of an hour before he might be expected. She bathed her face, shook out her short, thick hair, twisted it back from her forehead. Next she crowned her oval, deep-cream face with a wide black hat, whose somberness was repeated in a broad velvet ribbon around the waist of her white dress.
But she looked anything
