“I’ve only done it for fun but I won’t do it any more if it displeases you. I’d much rather live in the smallest house in the world with you, Junius, than be wandering around as I have so often, lonely and unknown in hotels and restaurants.” Her sweetness disarmed him. There was no reason in the world why she should give up her harmless pleasure unless, he added rather sternly, some genuine principle were involved.
It was the happiest moment of her life when Junius had gone to Madame and told her that both he and Mattie were leaving. “We are going to be married,” he announced proudly. The actress had been sorry to lose her, and wanted to give her a hundred dollars, but the tall, black coachman would not let his wife accept it. “She is to have only what she earned,” he said in stern refusal. He hated Madame Sylvio for having thrown the girl in the way of Haynes Brokinaw.
They had married and gone straight into the little house on Opal Street which later was to become their own. Mattie her husband considered a perfect woman, sweet, industrious, affectionate and illogical. But to her he was God.
When Angela and Virginia were little children and their mother used to read them fairy tales she would add to the ending, “And so they lived happily ever after, just like your father and me.”
All this was passing happily through her mind on this Monday morning. Junius was working somewhere in the neighbourhood; his shop was down on Bainbridge Street, but he tried to devote Mondays and Tuesdays to work up town so that he could run in and help Mattie on these trying days. Before the advent of the washing machine he used to dart in and out two or three times in the course of a morning to lend a hand to the heavy sheets and the bedspreads. Now those articles were taken care of in the laundry, but Junius still kept up the pleasant fiction.
Virginia attended school just around the corner, and presently she would come in too, not so much to get her own lunch as to prepare it for her mother. She possessed her father’s attitude toward Mattie as someone who must be helped, indulged and protected. Moreover she had an unusually keen sense of gratitude toward her father and mother for their kindness and their unselfish ambitions for their children. Jinny never tired of hearing of the difficult childhood of her parents. She knew of no story quite so thrilling as the account of their early trials and difficulties. She thought it wonderfully sweet of them to plan, as they constantly did, better things for their daughters. “My girls shall never come through my experiences,” Mattie would say firmly. They were both to be schoolteachers and independent.
It is true that neither of them felt any special leaning toward this calling. Angela frankly despised it, but she supposed she must make her living some way. The salary was fairly good—in fact, very good for a poor girl—and there would be the long summer vacation. At fourteen she knew already how much money she would save during those first two or three years and how she would spend those summer vacations. But although she proffered this much information to her family she kept her plans to herself. Mattie often pondered on this lack of openness in her older daughter. Virginia was absolutely transparent. She did not think she would care for teaching either, that is, not for teaching in the ordinary sense. But she realized that for the present that was the best profession which her parents could have chosen for them. She would spend her summers learning all she could about methods of teaching music.
“And a lot of good it will do you,” Angela scoffed. “You know perfectly well that there are no coloured teachers of music in the public schools here in Philadelphia.” But Jinny thought it possible that there might be. “When Mamma was coming along there were very few coloured teachers at all, and now it looks as though there’d be plenty of chance for us. And anyway you never know your luck.”
By four o’clock the day’s work was over and Mattie free to do as she pleased. This was her idle hour. The girls would get dinner, a Monday version of whatever the main course had been the day before. Their mother was on no account to be disturbed or importuned. Today as usual she sat in the Morris chair in the dining-room, dividing her time between the Sunday paper and the girls’ chatter. It was one of her most cherished experiences—this sense of a day’s hard labour far behind her, the happy voices of her girls, her joyous expectation of her husband’s homecoming. Usually the children made a game of their preparations, recalling some nonsense of their early childhood days when it had been their delight to dress up as ladies. Virginia would approach Angela: “Pardon me, is this Mrs. Henrietta Jones?” And Angela, drawing herself up haughtily would reply: “Er—really you have the advantage of me.” Then Virginia: “Oh pardon! I thought you were Mrs. Jones and I had heard my friend Mrs. Smith speak of you so often and since you were in the neighbourhood and passing, I was going to ask you in to have some ice-cream.” The game of course being that Angela should immediately drop her haughtiness and proceed for the sake of the goodies to ingratiate herself into her neighbour’s esteem. It was a poor joke, long since worn thin, but the two girls still used the greeting and for some reason it had become part of the
