That he might be forced to sit in a segregated section of the church had occurred to Jean. Of late years that custom had grown in popularity even in New Orleans in the churches not attended wholly by Negroes. But that he might be refused even admittance had been a terrific shock from which he never completely recovered. Mrs. Daquin had said nothing, but a faint smile which seemed to Mimi to shout exultantly: “I told you so!” wreathed her face. Mrs. Hunter’s gentle hints that “the” church to attend was the Congregational had not fallen on barren ground. It was not long therefore before Sunday morning found her and Mimi and Jean in one of the pews there. …
Not many months passed before Mrs. Daquin was as much at home as though she had lived since birth in Atlanta. Mimi, too, was accepted in time, though with reservations. Her affection for Hilda was so apparent there was no mistaking that she esteemed her above all the other girls she met. Both of them had completed their grammar-school careers when Mimi came to Atlanta—both entered high school at Atlanta University in the same class that fall. They walked to school together and they walked home together. They confided each to the other their innermost secrets, they aired their grievances against whatever displeased either of them, secure in the knowledge that the other would understand and would be in complete sympathy. There came, of course, little differences, but these soon evaporated in the warm surge of reconciliation.
This very friendship in a manner prevented Mimi’s acceptance into the fold of complete conformity. Mrs. Adams was invited to all the parties and she in turn did her share of entertaining. But always there was an air of detachment in her social relations she seemed merely to be going through the motions of things which did not greatly interest her, if indeed she did not derive a kind of quiet amusement from the frantic efforts to out-entertain each other.
Instead of attempting to serve courses more in number and elaborateness, to decorate her house more gorgeously than the member of the Fleur-de-Lis Club who had entertained the last time, Mrs. Adams served simple but well-prepared “collations,” as they were called. The sensing that they were more attractive for their very simplicity did not serve to sweeten the tempers of those who depended on elaborateness. This same simplicity governed all Mrs. Adams’ actions whether in social or other relations. It had brought to her the damning reputation of being “stuck-up” and there is none other accusation more certain to gain a measured unpopularity. This reputation, though unfounded in fact as in the case of her mother, had been attached to Hilda and, in turn, to her friend, Mimi.
To about the same degree Mimi’s lack of religious conformity militated against her. She felt a certain bitterness against the Catholic Church for its surrender to a race prejudice which to her seemed silly, but her animosity towards that Church was based most largely on the fact that the surrender had hurt Jean. With the fortunate tendency of youth not to bother itself too greatly about creeds and dogmas, Mimi might quickly have forgotten or at least put into the limbo of half-forgotten things most of the religious duties which to her in New Orleans had seemed so natural—as natural as eating or sleeping. Though Jean rarely mentioned it now, Mimi knew he grieved deeply that he could not attend mass—that down deep beneath the calm exterior he presented to the world and even to his family, Jean felt the loss keenly of church attendance. And when Mimi saw this hurt, it caused her frequently to speak of the differences she noticed between Catholic and Protestant devotees. Usually these were, quite naturally, more critical of the Protestant, and this constant reiteration of her own unconformity to local creeds and beliefs in time caused the phrase “those Catholics” to be instinctively synonymous with her name and Jean’s. …
But it was the instinctive cruelty towards and jealousy of woman to woman which created difficulties for Mimi. Something of the colourfulness of the sapphire and purple and jade green waters round New Orleans had gone into the making of Mimi. There was in her too something of the grace of the languorous waves of the Gulf of Mexico as they lapped the jagged shores of Barataria. In her too was the luxuriousness of tropic plants bursting into startlingly vivid and beautiful reds and yellows and greens and blues. Her reddish hair in the sunlight was a magnet that caught and held the eye, the mind meanwhile feasting on its brilliant decorativeness.
And in combination with these reminders of tropic warmth and colour was Mimi’s air, piquant, vaguely mysterious and seductive. Not that she was aware of all this, nor did she do other than laugh when Hilda compared her to some other girl, always to the disparagement of the other one. There were other pretty ones—several of them, in fact, more beautiful than Mimi. Yet, none of them possessed the combination which was hers and, not having lived in Atlanta all her life and thus newer to the eye, Mimi without apparent volition drew to her side most of the younger men. And the eyes of even the older ones she drew to her, covered, if the wife of the beholder was at his side, by a studiously casual remark like “That little Daquin girl
