Her strong, independent nature, buffeted and sickened and strengthened by the constant attrition of colour prejudice, was unable to visualise or to pardon the frame of mind which kept Roger from joining battle with life when the odds were already so overwhelmingly in his favour. Alone, possessed of a handicap which if guessed at would have been as disabling as a game leg or an atrophied body, she had dared enter the lists. And she was well on the way to winning a victory. It was to cost her, she was beginning to realize, more than she had anticipated. But having entered she was not one to draw back—unless indeed she changed her goal. Hers was a curious mixture of materialism and hedonism, and at this moment the latter quality was uppermost in her life. But she supposed that in some vague future she and Roger would marry. His ardour rendered her complacent.
But she was not conscious of any of these inner conflicts and criticisms; she was too happy. Now she was adopting a curious detachment toward life tempered by a faint cynicism—a detachment which enabled her to say to herself: “Rules are for ordinary people but not for me.” She remembered a verse from a poet, a coloured woman about whom she had often wondered. The lines ran:
“The strong demand, contend, prevail.
The beggar is a fool!”
She would never be a beggar. She would ask no further counsel nor advice of anyone. She had been lucky thus far in seeking advice only from Paulette and Martha Burden, two people of markedly independent methods of thought and action. They had never held her back. Now she would no longer consult even them. She would live her life as an individualist, to suit herself without regard for the conventions and established ways of life. Her native fastidiousness, she was sure, would keep her from becoming an offence in her own eyes.
In spite of her increasing self-confidence and self-sufficiency Roger’s frequent absences left her lonely. Almost then, without any conscious planning on her part, she began to work at her art with growing vigour and interest. She was gaining in assurance; her technique showed an increased mastery, above all she had gained in the power to compose, a certain sympathy, a breadth of comprehension, the manifestation of that ability to interpret which she had long suspected lay within her, lent themselves to her hand. Mr. Paget, the instructor, spoke of her paintings with increased respect; the attention of visitors was directed thereto. Martha Burden and even Paulette, in the intervals of her ecstatic preparations, admitted her to the freemasonry of their own assured standing. Anthony Cross reminded her of the possibilities for American students at Fontainebleau. But she only smiled wisely; she would have no need of such study, but she hoped with all her heart that Miss Powell would be the recipient of a prize which would enable her to attend there.
“If she isn’t,” she promised herself, “I’ll make Roger give her her expenses. I’d be willing to take the money from him for that.”
To her great surprise her other interest besides her painting lay in visiting Jinny. If anyone had asked her if she were satisfied with her own life, her reply would have been an instant affirmative. But she did not want such a life for her sister. For Virginia there must be no risks, no secrets, no irregularities. Her efforts to find out how her sister spent her free hours amazed herself; their fruitlessness filled her with a constant irritation which Virginia showed no inclination to allay. The younger girl had passed her examination and had been appointed; she was a successful and enthusiastic teacher; this much Angela knew, but beyond this nothing. She gathered that Virginia spent a good deal of time with a happy, intelligent, rather independent group of young coloured men and women; there was talk occasionally of the theatre, of a dance, of small clubs, of hikes, of classes at Columbia or at New York City College. Angela even met a gay, laughing party, consisting of Virginia and her friends en route to Brooklyn, she had been later informed briefly. The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist’s eye noted, were gay, vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless. Angela began tardily to recognize that her sister had made her way into that curious, limited, yet shifting class of the “best” coloured people; the old Philadelphia phrase came drifting back to her, “people that you know.” She was amazed at some of the names which Virginia let drop from her lips in her infrequent and laconic descriptions of certain evenings which she had spent in the home of Van Meier, a great coloured American, a littérateur, a fearless and dauntless apostle of the rights of man; his name was known, Martha Burden had assured her, on both sides of the water.
Such information she picked up as best she might for Virginia vouchsafed nothing; nor did she, on the infrequent occasions on which she ran across her sister, even appear to know her. This Angela pointed out, was silly. “You might just as well speak,” she told Jinny petulantly, remembering uncomfortably the occasion when she herself had cut her sister, an absolute stranger in New York. “Plenty of white and coloured people are getting to know each other and they always acknowledge the acquaintanceship. Why shouldn’t we? No harm could come of it.” But in Virginia’s cool opinion no good could come of it either. Usually the younger girl preserved a discreet silence; whatever resolves she might have made with regard to the rupture between herself
