“Don’t be frightened or worried—I was so in hopes you did care for him. His father and I are terribly worried about him—he has always been a restless, queer sort of a child but as long as you and he were friendly he seemed satisfied. Oh, yes, I know the silly talk that was going around,” she put in as Mimi started to speak, “but nobody who counted ever believed that rot.”
“That wasn’t the reason we did what we did, Mrs. Hunter,” Mimi quickly broke in. “It was on account of Hilda—”
“Hilda? What did she have to do with it?”
Mimi told her the story while Mrs. Hunter showed on her face the amazement she felt.
“Silly little fool!” she pontifically announced when Mimi had finished.
“She isn’t a silly little fool and she’s far too good a girl for Carl or any other boy I’ve seen around here!” Mimi hotly declared, her anger flaming high at the disparagement of her friend. It never occurred to her that she had applied the same term to Hilda or at least terms suspiciously similar in meaning.
“Oh, don’t misunderstand me, dearie,” Mrs. Hunter hastened to cover her hasty statement. “Mind you, I didn’t mean she wasn’t good enough for my Carl but that she didn’t show very good judgment. But that isn’t what I came to talk about. It’s this. Carl, since you and he stopped seeing each other, has taken to staying out nights with all sorts of people and three times this week he’s come home drunk. He’s in such a nasty temper I’ve been afraid to say anything to him and I know there’ll be a terrible scene when his father finds out about his carryings-on.”
“I’m sorry to hear Carl’s acting this way, Mrs. Hunter, but what have I got to do with it?” Mimi, puzzled, asked.
“I was wondering if you’d let him see you occasionally—and—and I thought maybe you cared enough to be willing to do that and see if he would stop. Oh, Mimi, he’s my boy and I want you to help me to save him from himself.”
Mimi did not know what to say. She felt sorry, terribly sorry, for Mrs. Hunter—knowing her, she knew the ordeal through which the older woman was going, imperiously proud as she was, in abasing herself before a younger woman, an outsider, and confessing her weakness, her impotence in saving her own son. On the other hand there was her promise to Hilda. True, Carl had said twice he did not care and would never care for Hilda, but that made her own promise none the less binding. She felt impatience with Carl coming over her. She was not puritanical by nature but Carl’s rapid succumbing to temptation vexed her, he was destroying the ideal she had created in her mind of which he was the embodiment.
Her indecisiveness was due more than to any other cause to her own lack of understanding of the full importance of Mrs. Hunter’s words. This was not because of stupidity, it was because of Mimi’s amazing innocence of life. She had never fully realized why there should have been so much talk regarding the visit she and Carl had paid to the dance hall. The people she saw there she knew were not of her class nor were they of the kind she ever encountered. Margot and Jean had closely guarded Mimi from all influences which they felt might contaminate her mind. They had seen to it that her playmates were from families which observed identically the same customs and beliefs as did the Daquins. At school Mimi had heard phrases which would have shocked her had she understood their import but, knowing nothing of what they meant, she had given them no particular thought.
The same circumstance had existed during the years in Atlanta, where it was considered highly immoral to mention even the most rudimentary facts about oneself. Mimi had asked questions but these had been more or less skillfully evaded. She had asked only once about certain amazingly distressing things she noticed in her body and the answer to that query, implying as it did that she had said something she should not have mentioned, had sealed her lips. But in her own mind she had wondered at and been distressed by these things, by periods of intense depression when the most minor incident made her cry or laugh. Thus Mrs. Hunter’s dark suggestions regarding Carl’s deviations meant little to her and she wondered that his own mother and father could be so lacking in control over him that she had to appeal to her to help save him.
“I asked Carl at church two weeks ago,” she began, Mrs. Hunter meanwhile waiting anxiously for Mimi’s decision, “why he never came to see us anymore and he told me he didn’t want to.”
“Oh, please, Mimi,” the mother pleaded, begging almost piteously for her boy, “ask him again and again until he does come. You can save him—if you will.”
“I’ve asked him once and if he doesn’t want to come to see me then I won’t ask him again,” Mimi said firmly.
Mrs. Hunter rose, her eyes wet with tears. She jabbed them jerkily with a tiny square of linen, ludicrously small for one of her bulk, Mimi thought irrelevantly even as she pitied the older woman’s plight. …
Mrs. Daquin sought skillfully to pry from Mimi the reason for Mrs. Hunter’s visit but Mimi evaded her questions and went to her own room. Her resentment against Carl increased. It was so silly of him to act as he was doing. Mrs. Hunter was an old frump, it was true, but she was a decent old sort after all. Mimi wondered just what he had been doing. Getting drunk was pretty bad for a young man who was yet in most respects a boy. Mimi remembered Jean and his demijohn of double port-wine after Margot died and before Mary Robertson came to
