The little gathering to which Martha had invited her was made up of members as strongly individual as the host and hostess. They were all specialists in their way, and specialists for the most part in some offshoot of a calling or movement which was itself already highly specialized. Martha presented a psychiatrist, a war correspondent—“I’m that only when there is a war of course,” he explained to Angela’s openly respectful gaze—a dramatist, a corporation lawyer, a white-faced, conspicuously beautiful poet with a long evasive Russian name, two press agents, a theatrical manager, an actress who played only Shakespeare roles, a teacher of defective children and a medical student who had been a conscientious objector and had served a long time at Leavenworth. He lapsed constantly into a rapt self-communing from which he only roused himself to utter fiery tirades against the evils of society.
In spite of their highly specialised interests they were all possessed of a common ground of knowledge in which such subjects as Russia, Consumers’ Leagues, and the coming presidential election figured most largely. There was much laughter and chaffing but no airiness, no persiflage. One of the press agents, Mrs. Cecil, entered upon a long discussion with the corporation lawyer on a Bill pending before Congress; she knew as much as he about the matter and held her own in a long and almost bitter argument which only the coming of refreshments broke up.
Just before the close of the argument two other young men had come in, but Angela never learned their vocation. Furthermore she was interested in observing the young teacher of defective children. She was coloured; small and well-built, exquisitely dressed, and of a beautiful tint, all bronze and soft red, “like Jinny” thought Angela, a little astonished to observe how the warmth of her appearance overshadowed or rather overshone everyone else in the room. The tawniness even of Miss Burden’s hair went dead beside her. The only thing to cope with her richness was the classical beauty of the Russian poet’s features. He seemed unable to keep his eyes away from her; was punctiliously attentive to her wants and leaned forward several times during the long political discussion to whisper low spoken and apparently amusing comments. The young woman, perfectly at ease in her deep chair, received his attentions with a slightly detached, amused objectivity; an objectivity which she had for everyone in the room including Angela at whom she had glanced once rather sharply. But the detachment of her manner was totally different from Miss Powell’s sensitive dignity. Totally without self-consciousness she let her warm dark eyes travel from one face to another. She might have been saying: “How far you are away from the things that really matter, birth and death and hard, hard work!” The Russian poet must have realized this, for once Angela heard him say, leaning forward, “You think all this is futile, don’t you?”
Martha motioned for her to wait a moment until most of the other guests had gone, then she came forward with one of the two young men who had come in without introduction. “This is Roger Fielding, he’ll see you home.”
He was tall and blond with deeply blue eyes which smiled on her as he said: “Would you like to walk or ride? It’s raining a little.”
Angela said she preferred to walk.
“All right then. Here, Starr, come across with that umbrella I lent you.”
They went out into the thin, tingling rain of late Autumn. “I was surprised,” said Roger, “to see you there with the highbrows. I didn’t think you looked that way when I met you at Paulette’s.”
“We’ve met before? I’m—I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to remember you.”
“No I don’t suppose you would. Well, we didn’t exactly meet; I saw you one day at Paulette’s. That’s why I came this evening, because I heard you’d be here and I’d get a chance to see you again; but I was surprised because you didn’t seem like that mouthy bunch. They make me tired taking life so plaguey seriously. Martha and her old highbrows!” he ended ungratefully.
Angela, a little taken back with the frankness of his desire to meet her, said she hadn’t thought they were serious.
“Not think them serious? Great Scott! what kind of talk are you used to? You look as though you’d just come out of a Sunday-school! Do you prefer bible texts?”
But she could not explain to him the picture which she saw in her mind of men and women at her father’s home in Opal Street—the men talking painfully of rents, of lynchings, of building and loan associations; the women of childbearing and the sacrifices which must be made to put Gertie through school, to educate Howard. “I don’t mean for any of my children to go through what I did.” And in later years in her own first maturity, young Henson and Sawyer and the others in the tiny parlour talking of ideals and inevitable sacrifices for the race; the burnt-offering of individualism for some dimly glimpsed racial whole. This was seriousness, even sombreness, with a great sickening vital upthrust of reality. But these other topics, peaks of civilization superimposed upon peaks, she found, even though interesting, utterly futile.
They had reached the little hall now. “We must talk loud,” she whispered.
“Why?” he asked, speaking obediently very loud indeed.
“Wait a minute; no, she’s not there. The girl above me meets her young man here at night and just as sure as I forget her and
