“Not much you can’t. Better not try it, Joanna. You have to found your life on love, then you can do all these other things.”
“Don’t talk like a silly, Peter. You know perfectly well that for a woman love usually means a household of children, the getting of a thousand meals, picking up laundry, no time to herself for meditation, or reading or—”
“Dancing! That’s through poor management. Marry a man who understands you, Janna, and he’ll see that you have time for anything you want. Where is such a man? Behold him!” He struck his chest dramatically.
“Peter Bye! How you talk!”
“All right, I’ll choose something else. Tell me why is it that though I’ve elected to stay in New York in all this hot weather just to be at your side, I see less of you than at any time since I’ve been coming to your house.”
“Does seem queer, doesn’t it? It must be because I have so much work to do. I am taking extra singing lessons from Brailoff now. And my dancing takes up a lot of my time; my classes come at such inconvenient hours, 7:30 to 10:00 three times a week.”
“That is bad. Funny time to give dancing lessons. Where’d you say you took them?”
“At Bertully’s.”
“Bertully’s! That’s in Twenty-ninth Street, isn’t it? How’d you ever make it? I didn’t suppose a colored girl got a chance to stick her nose in there.”
“She wouldn’t ordinarily. Bertully refused Helena Arnold last year. ‘I’m sorry, Mees, but the white Americans like not to study with the brown Americans. Vair seely, but so. I am a poor man, I must follow the weeshes of my clients!’ ” Joanna shrugged her shoulders, spread her hands.
“You’re a born impersonator, Jan. I can see that little Frenchman now. How’d you ever get in, then?”
“Helena and I went back this year and asked if he would take a separate class of colored girls, if we got it up for him. He was very decent, said he’d be glad to. So we got up a class of eight, he only asked for six. Of course, we had to take his hours.”
“Who are in it besides you and Helena?”
“Oh, all our crowd.” She named the daughters of several prominent colored men, a physician, a lawyer, a journalist, a real-estate man among them. “There’s Gertrude Moseley, Vera and Alice Manning, Elizabeth Beckett, Sylvia, Helena, and I.”
“That’s seven.”
“Oh, yes, Sylvia meant to ask Maggie Ellersley.”
“H’m, she had other things in her head without bothering about fancy dancing, hadn’t she? Funny how she went off and married without telling any of us about it, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Joanna uneasily.
“You’d have thought she’d have let old Phil in on it. I wonder if they had a falling out of any kind! Philip seemed rather hard hit when he heard the news.”
“Not a bit of it. Why should he be?” Joanna spoke stoutly. But her tone belied her convictions. She hadn’t forgotten Philip’s expression the day Sylvia had come rushing in with the astounding news:
“What do you think? I just met Mrs. Ellersley. Maggie’s married—married—think of it! She ran away with that man at her house, that Mr. Neal. And they’re going to live in Philadelphia.”
Philip’s haggard face had turned a trifle more wan, Joanna had thought. “Has she written to you, Sylvia?” he asked her quickly.
“Not a word. I can’t imagine why she said nothing to me about it. She must have planned it for ages. If that isn’t the funniest!”
Later Joanna heard Philip asking his mother if she were sure she had given him all the mail that had come for him while he was in Philadelphia. Still later he had announced his intention of teaching summer school in South Carolina.
“Fellow whose place I’m going to fill is sick. They’ve been at me a long time to come. I think I ought to go, father. It will give me a chance to see the South.”
Joanna’s throat constricted a little at the thought of Philip’s look, his general listlessness. She wished she hadn’t written that letter. Though that couldn’t have brought about the marriage. People don’t arrange to be married over night. As Sylvia said, it must have been on Maggie’s mind long since. And then, anyway, Philip couldn’t really have cared for a girl like Maggie.
“I don’t believe Philip was the least bit interested in Maggie,” she voiced her thought to Peter. “Well, anyway, Mr. Bye, that’s why my company is so scarce. Goodness, what are you frowning about?”
“Well, I’m mad to think you swallowed that Frenchman’s insult. To think of your taking lessons from him after that!”
“But, Peter, he didn’t insult us. He can’t help this stupid prejudice. ‘In my country, Mademoiselle Maréchal,’—he always calls me that—‘you’d be an honor to any class.’ He says I’ve got a great future. That if there’s anything that will break down prejudice it will be equality or perhaps even superiority on the part of colored people in the arts. And I agree with him.”
“But to be set apart like that!”
“What do I care?” asked Joanna, the practical. “You’ve got to take life as you find it, Peter. The way I figure it is this. If all I needed to get on the stage was the mastery of a difficult step, I’d get there, wouldn’t I? For somehow, sometime, I’d learn how to overcome that difficulty.”
“You bet you would.”
“Very well, then. Now my problem is how to master, how to get around prejudice. It is an awful nuisance; in some parts of this country it is more than a nuisance, it’s a veritable menace. Philip says he’s going to change all that some day. First, I’m going to get my training up to the last notch, then I’m going to watch for an opportunity and squeeze in.”
“You’ll never get it.”
“Oh, yes, I will. Some white people are kind, some of them are so truly artistic that they’ll put themselves to great trouble for the sake of
