But tonight Angela’s response lacked spontaneity. She was absorbed and reserved, even a little sulky. Deftly and swiftly she moved about her work, however, and no one who had not attended regularly on those Monday evening preparations could have guessed that there was anything on her mind other than complete absorption in the problem of cutting the bread or garnishing the warmed over roast beef. But Mattie was aware of the quality of brooding in her intense concentration. She had seen it before in her daughter but tonight, though to her practised eye it was more apparent than ever, she could not put her hand on it. Angela’s response, if asked what was the matter, would be “Oh, nothing.” It came to her suddenly that her older daughter was growing up; in a couple of months she would be fifteen. Children were often absorbed and moody when they were in their teens, too engaged in finding themselves to care about their effect on others. She must see to it that the girl had plenty of rest; perhaps school had been too strenuous for her today; she thought the high school programme very badly arranged, five hours one right after the other were much too long. “Angela, child, I think you’d better not be long out of bed tonight; you look very tired to me.”
Angela nodded. But her father came in then and in the little hubbub that arose about his homecoming and the final preparations for supper her listlessness went without further remark.
IV
The third storey front was Angela’s bedroom. She was glad of its loneliness and security tonight—even if her mother had not suggested her going to bed early she would have sought its shelter immediately after supper. Study for its own sake held no attractions for her; she did not care for any of her subjects really except Drawing and French. And when she was drawing she did not consider that she was studying, it was too naturally a means of self-expression. As for French, she did have to study that with great care, for languages did not come to her with any great readiness, but there was an element of fine lady-ism about the beautiful, logical tongue that made her in accordance with some secret subconscious ambition resolve to make it her own.
The other subjects, History, English, and Physical Geography, were not drudgery, for she had a fair enough mind; but then they were not attractive either, and she was lacking in Virginia’s dogged resignation to unwelcome duties. Even when Jinny was a little girl she had been know to say manfully in the face of an uncongenial task: “Well I dotta det it done.” Angela was not like that. But tonight she was concentrating with all her power on her work. During the day she had been badly hurt; she had received a wound whose depth and violence she would not reveal even to her parents—because, and this only increased the pain, young as she was she knew that there was nothing they could do about it. There was nothing to be done but to get over it. Only she was not developed enough to state this stoicism to herself. She was like a little pet cat that had once formed part of their household; its leg had been badly torn by a passing dog, and the poor thing had dragged itself into the house and lain on its cushion patiently, waiting stolidly for this unfamiliar agony to subside. So Angela waited for the hurt in her mind to cease.
But across the history dates on the printed page and through stately lines of Lycidas she kept seeing Mary Hastings’ accusing face, hearing Mary Hastings’ accusing voice:
“Coloured! Angela, you never told me that you were coloured!”
And then her own voice in tragic but proud bewilderment. “Tell you that I was coloured! Why of course I never told you that I was coloured. Why should I?”
She had been so proud of Mary Hastings’ friendship. In the dark and tortured spaces of her difficult life it had been a lovely, hidden refuge. It had been an experience so rarely sweet that she had hardly spoken of it even to Virginia. The other girls in her class had meant nothing to her. At least she had schooled herself to have them mean nothing. Some of them she had known since early childhood; they had lived in her neighbourhood and had gone to the graded schools with her. They had known that she was coloured, for they had seen her with Virginia, and sometimes her tall, black father had come to fetch her home on a rainy day. There had been pleasant enough contacts and intimacies; in the quiet of Jefferson Street they had played “The Farmer in the Dell,” and “Here Come Three Jolly, Jolly Sailor-Boys”; dark retreats of the old market had afforded endless satisfaction for hide-and-go-seek. She and those other children had gone shopping arm in arm for school supplies, threading their way in and out of the bustle and confusion that were Columbia Avenue.
As she grew older many of these intimacies lessened, in some cases ceased altogether. But she was never conscious of being left completely alone; there was always someone with whom to eat lunch or who was going her way after school. It was not until she reached the high school that she began to realize how solitary her life was becoming. There were no other coloured girls in her class but there had been only two or three during her school-life, and if there had been any she would not necessarily have confined herself to them; that this might be a good thing to do in sheer self-defence would hardly have occurred to her. But this problem did not confront her; what did confront her was that the very girls with whom she had grown up were evading her; when she went to the Assembly none
