Jenny began to laugh, to giggle in fact. For a moment she was the Virginia of her school days, rejoicing in some innocent mischief, full of it. “I wasn’t out. There’s a washroom down the hall and I went there to wash my face—” it clouded a moment. “And when I came back I walked as I thought into my room. Instead of that I had walked into the room of another lodger. And there he sat—”
“Oh,” said Angela inattentively. “I’m glad you weren’t out. I was quite worried. Listen, Virginia,” she began desperately, “I know you think that what I did in the station the other day was unspeakable; it seems almost impossible for me to explain it to you. But that man with me was a very special friend—”
“He must have been indeed,” Jinny interrupted drily, “to make you cut your own sister.” She was still apparently fooling with her hair, her head perched on one side, her eyes glued to the mirror. But she was not making much progress and her lips were trembling.
Angela proceeded unheeding, afraid to stop. “A special friend, and we had come to a very crucial point in our relationship. It was with him that I had the engagement yesterday.”
“Well, what about it? Were you expecting him to ask you to marry him? Did he?”
“No,” said Angela very low, “that’s just what he didn’t do though he—he asked everything else.”
Virginia, dropping the hairbrush, swung about sharply. “And you let him talk like that?”
“I couldn’t help it once he had begun—I was so taken by surprise, and, besides, I think that his ultimate intentions are all right.”
“His ultimate intentions! Why, Angela what are you talking about? You know perfectly well what his ultimate intentions are. Isn’t he a white man? Well, what kind of intentions would he have toward a coloured woman?”
“Simple! He doesn’t know I’m coloured. And besides some of them are decent. You must remember that I know something about these people and you don’t, you couldn’t, living that humdrum little life of yours at home.”
“I know enough about them and about men in general to recognize an insult when I hear one. Some men bear their character stamped right on their faces. Now this man into whose room I walked last night by mistake—”
“I don’t see how you can do very much talking walking into strange men’s rooms at ten o’clock at night.”
The triviality of the retort left Jinny dumb.
It was their first quarrel.
They sat in silence for a few minutes; for several minutes. Virginia, apparently completely composed, was letting the tendrils of her mind reach far, far out to the ultimate possibilities of this impasse in relationship between herself and her sister. She thought: “I really have lost her, she’s really gone out of my ken just as I used to lose her years ago when father and I would be singing ‘The Dying Christian.’ I’m twenty-three years old and I’m really all alone in the world.” Up to this time she had always felt she had Angela’s greater age and supposedly greater wisdom to fall back on, but she banished this conjecture forever. “Because if she could cut me when she hadn’t seen me for a year for the sake of a man who she must have known meant to insult her, she certainly has no intention of openly acknowledging me again. And I don’t believe I want to be a sister in secret. I hate this hole and corner business.”
She saw again the scene in the station, herself at first so serene, so self-assured, Angela’s confused coldness, Roger’s insolence. Something hardened, grew cold within her. Even his arrogance had failed to bring Angela to her senses, and suddenly she remembered that it had been possible in slavery times for white men and women to mistreat their mulatto relations, their own flesh and blood, selling them into deeper slavery in the far South or standing by watching them beaten, almost, if not completely, to death. Perhaps there was something fundamentally different between white and coloured blood after all. Aloud she said: “You know before you went away that Sunday morning you said that you and I were different. Perhaps you’re right, Angela; perhaps there is an extra infusion of white blood in your veins which lets you see life at another angle. If that’s the case I have no right to judge you. You must forgive my ignorant comments.”
She began slipping into a ratine dress of old blue trimmed with narrow collars and cuffs and a tiny belt of old rose. Above the soft shades the bronze and black of her head etched themselves sharply; she might have been a dainty bird of Paradise cast in a new arrangement of colours but her tender face was set in strange and implacable lines.
Angela looked at her miserably. She had not known just what, in her wounded pride and humiliation, she had expected to gain from her sister, but certainly she had hoped for some balm. And in any event not this cool aloofness. She had forgotten that her sister might be suffering from a wound as poignant as her own. The year had made a greater breach than she had anticipated; she had never been as outspoken, as frank with Virginia as the latter had been with her, but there had always been a common ground between them, a meeting place. In the household Jinny had had something of a reputation for her willingness to hear all sides of a story, to find an excuse or make one.
An old aphorism of Hetty Daniels returned to her. “He who would have friends must show himself friendly.” And she had done anything but that; she had neglected Jinny, had failed to answer her letters, had even planned—was it only day before yesterday!—to see very little of her in what she had dreamed would
