“Here, here, where do you think you’re going?”
Matthew answered unsuspecting: “It’s all right. The young lady gave you the tickets.”
“Yes, but not for you; she can go in, but you can’t.” He handed him the torn ticket, turned and took one of the stubs from Angela, and thrust that in the young man’s unwilling hand. “Go over there and get your refund.”
“But,” said Matthew and Angela could feel his very manhood sickening under the silly humiliation of the moment, “there must be some mistake. I sat in this same theatre less than three weeks ago.”
“Well, you won’t sit in there tonight; the management’s changed hands since then, and we’re not selling tickets to coloured people.” He glanced at Angela a little uncertainly. “The young lady can come in—”
Angela threw her ticket on the floor. “Oh, come Matthew, come.”
Outside he said stiffly, “I’ll get a taxi, we’ll go somewhere else.”
“No, no! We wouldn’t enjoy it. Let’s go home and we don’t need a taxi. We can get the Sixteenth Street car right at the corner.”
She was very kind to him in the car; she was so sorry for him, suddenly conscious of the pain which must be his at being stripped before the girl he loved of his masculine right to protect, to appear the hero.
She let him open the two doors for her but stopped him in the box of a hall. “I think I’ll say good night now, Matthew; I’m more tired than I realized. But—but it was an adventure, wasn’t it?”
His eyes adored her, his hand caught hers: “Angela, I’d have given all I hope to possess to have been able to prevent it; you know I never dreamed of letting you in for such humiliation. Oh how are we ever going to get this thing straight?”
“Well, it wasn’t your fault.” Unexpectedly she lifted her delicate face to his, so stricken and freckled and woebegone, and kissed him; lifted her hand and actually stroked his reddish, stiff, “bad” hair.
Like a man in a dream he walked down the street wondering how long it would be before they married.
Angela, waking in the middle of the night and reviewing to herself the events of the day, said aloud: “This is the end,” and fell asleep again.
The little back room was still Jinny’s, but Angela, in order to give the third storey front to Hetty Daniels, had moved into the room which had once been her mother’s. She and Virginia had placed the respective headboards of their narrow, virginal beds against the dividing wall so that they could lie in bed and talk to each other through the communicating doorway, their voices making a circuit from speaker to listener in what Jinny called a hairpin curve.
Angela called in as soon as she heard her sister moving, “Jinny, listen. I’m going away.”
Her sister, still half asleep, lay intensely quiet for another second, trying to pick up the continuity of this dream. Then her senses came to her.
“What’d you say, Angela?”
“I said I was going away. I’m going to leave Philadelphia, give up school teaching, break away from our loving friends and acquaintances, and bust up the whole shooting match.”
“Haven’t gone crazy, have you?”
“No, I think I’m just beginning to come to my senses. I’m sick, sick, sick of seeing what I want dangled right before my eyes and then of having it snatched away from me and all of it through no fault of my own.”
“Darling, you know I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re driving at.”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Out came the whole story, an accumulation of the slights, real and fancied, which her colour had engendered throughout her lifetime; though even then she did not tell of that first hurt through Mary Hastings. That would always linger in some remote, impenetrable fastness of her mind, for wounded trust was there as well as wounded pride and love. “And these two last happenings with Matthew and Mr. Shields are just too much; besides they’ve shown me the way.”
“Shown you what way?”
Virginia had arisen and thrown an old rose kimono around her. She had inherited her father’s thick and rather coarsely waving black hair, enhanced by her mother’s softness. She was slender, yet rounded; her cheeks were flushed with sleep and excitement. Her eyes shone. As she sat in the brilliant wrap, cross-legged at the foot of her sister’s narrow bed, she made the latter think of a strikingly dainty, colourful robin.
“Well you see as long as the Shields thought I was white they were willing to help me to all the glories of the promised land. And the doorman last night—he couldn’t tell what I was, but he could tell about Matthew, so he put him out; just as the Shields are getting ready in another way to put me out. But as long as they didn’t know it didn’t matter. Which means it isn’t being coloured that makes the difference, it’s letting it be known. Do you see?
“So I’ve thought and thought. I guess really I’ve had it in my mind for a long time, but last night it seemed to stand right out in my consciousness. Why should I shut myself off from all the things I want most—clever people, people who do things, Art—” her voice spelt it with a capital—“travel and a lot of things which are in the world for everybody really but which only white people, as far as I can see, get their hands on. I mean scholarships and special funds, patronage. Oh Jinny, you don’t know, I don’t think you can understand the things I want to see and know. You’re not like me—”
“I don’t know why I’m not,” said Jinny looking more like a robin than ever. Her bright eyes
