Someone said: “Hi, there! Miss New One, have you got a decent eraser? All mine are on the blink.” Not so sure whether or not the term applied to herself she turned to meet the singularly intent gaze of a slender girl with blue eyes, light chestnut hair and cheeks fairly blazing with some unguessed excitement. Angela smiled and offered her eraser.
“It ought to be decent, it’s new.”
“Yes, it’s a very good one; many thanks. I’ll try not to trouble you again. My name’s Paulette Lister, what’s yours?”
“Angèle Mory.” She had changed it thus slightly when she came to New York. Some troubling sense of loyalty to her father and mother had made it impossible for her to do away with it altogether.
“Mory,” said a young man who had been working just beyond Paulette; “that’s Spanish. Are you by any chance?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He is,” said Paulette. “His name is Anthony Cruz—isn’t that a lovely name? But he changed it to Cross because no American would ever pronounce the z right, and he didn’t want to be taken for a widow’s cruse.”
“That’s a shameful joke,” said Cross, “but since I made it up, I think you might give me a chance to spring it, Miss Lister. A poor thing but mine own. You might have a heart.”
“Get even with her, why don’t you, by introducing her as Miss Blister?” asked Angela, highly diverted by the foolish talk.
Several people came in then, and she discovered that she had been half an hour too early, the class was just beginning. She glanced about at the newcomers, a beautiful Jewess with a pearly skin and a head positively foaming with curls, a tall Scandinavian, an obvious German, several more Americans. Not one of them made the photograph on her mind equal to those made by the coloured girl whose name, she learned, was Rachel Powell, the slate-eyed Martha Burden, Paulette Lister and Anthony Cross. Her prediction came true. With in a week she was on jestingly intimate terms with every one of them except Miss Powell, who lent her belongings, borrowed nothing, and spoke only when she was spoken to. At the end of ten days Miss Burden asked Angela to come and have lunch “at the same place where I go.”
On an exquisite afternoon she went to Harlem. At 135th Street she left the bus and walked through from Seventh Avenue to Lenox, then up to 147th Street and back down Seventh Avenue to 139th Street, through this to Eighth Avenue and then weaving back and forth between the two Avenues through 138th, 137th down to 135th Street to Eighth Avenue where she took the Elevated and went back to the New York which she knew.
But she was amazed and impressed at this bustling, frolicking, busy, laughing great city within a greater one. She had never seen coloured life so thick, so varied, so complete. Moreover, just as this city reproduced in microcosm all the important features of any metropolis, so undoubtedly life up here was just the same, she thought dimly, as life anywhere else. Not all these people, she realized, glancing keenly at the throngs of black and brown, yellow and white faces about her were servants or underlings or end men. She saw a beautiful woman all brown and red dressed as exquisitely as anyone she had seen on Fifth Avenue. A man’s sharp, high-bred face etched itself on her memory—the face of a professional man perhaps—it might be an artist. She doubted that; he might of course be a musician, but it was unlikely that he would be her kind of an artist, for how could he exist? Ah, there lay the great difference. In all material, even in all practical things these two worlds were alike, but in the production, the fostering of those ultimate manifestations, this world was lacking, for its people were without the means or the leisure to support them and enjoy. And these were the manifestations which she craved, together with the freedom to enjoy them. No, she was not sorry that she had chosen as she had, even though she could now realize that life viewed from the angle of Opal and Jefferson Streets in Philadelphia and that same life viewed from 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York might present bewilderingly different facets.
Unquestionably there was something very fascinating, even terrible, about this stream of life—it seemed to her to run thicker, more turgidly than that safe, sublimated existence in which her new friends had their being. It was deeper, more mightily moving even than the torrent of Fourteenth Street. Undoubtedly just as these people—for she already saw them objectively, doubly so, once with her natural remoteness and once with the remoteness of her new estate—just as these people could suffer more than others, just so they could enjoy themselves more. She watched the moiling groups on Lenox Avenue; the amazingly
