One of her best-paying customers for whom she sewed regularly every Thursday lived in Germantown. Often the work was so great she did not leave until very late but she was glad of this, for she was paid generously for her overtime and received her dinner, which meant an additional saving. One Thursday afternoon as she came down the stairs from the room where she always worked she met the husband of her employer.
“Hello,” he greeted her, “and who are you?”
She told him. After answering various questions regarding the length of time she had worked there and listening to his surprised comment that he had not seen her during all that time, he let her pass. But the following Thursday he was there again, this time earlier than before. He came into the room where she was hurrying through her work.
“Tell me about yourself,” he demanded, pleasantly, too pleasantly Mimi thought.
“There’s little to tell. I work for my living.”
“Your husband’s dead, then?” he remarked, looking at her black dress. Mimi yet wore mourning, partly because she could afford no new clothes. She began to gather her work to avoid his questions.
“You don’t mean to tell me you’re coloured?” he pursued, incredulously. “My wife told me about having a coloured girl sewing for her but I never expected to see anybody looking like you!”
“I am coloured.” Mimi assured him firmly as she tried to leave the room.
“Wait a minute—wait a minute,” he hastened to add. “I don’t mean any harm. I was born in the South and I always liked Negroes.”
“That’s very kind of you—but I’ve got to hurry home,” Mimi nervously answered as she sought to leave the room. He stood in front of her, his hands clasped behind his back, and the smile on his face made her think instinctively of a fat, sleepy-eyed and sleek cat teasing a mouse before devouring it.
“Those pretty little hands of yours are too delicate for hard work—and I never saw such lovely hair—do you know, I always was peculiarly susceptible to yellow hair—”
He drawled the words in what doubtless seemed to him to be an effective manner. He almost purred them. Mimi did not know whether to laugh or cry. She had seen scenes like this in the movies, and the cheap melodrama of such episodes had invariably made her want to snicker at their absurdity. But here was the thing she had laughed at in mild amusement happening to her, and it wasn’t all play, she knew, nor was she unaware of the very real danger behind his smooth and would-be seductive manner. At first she had been frightened, now she had to put forth a very real effort to keep from smiling. He felt the change in her manner and mistakenly thought it to be progress on his part.
“You don’t have to work so hard if you don’t want to,” he suggested, his words becoming bolder not so much in the actual phrases he used as in their increased suggestiveness. “I have no objection to coloured girls—in fact, I really prefer them—”
“That’s really very nice of you—very generous indeed,” Mimi observed, her amusement now rapidly conquering her apprehension.
“Oh, no, not at all—not at all!” he protested, thinking her serious. “Even when I lived in the South I had none of the usual prejudice.”
“How very remarkable!” cooed Mimi. Her voice had in it the velvety smoothness of swan’s-down.
To himself he thought, this is easier than I expected, as he advanced possessively towards her.
“How soon am I going to see you?” he queried softly.
“Don’t be silly!” Mimi calmly advised him. “In the first place you are fat. In the second, you are old and bald. In the third, you are white. Fourth, you are vain and stupid and ignorant and repulsive. Don’t think I’m falling back on the sentimental melodramatics of the ‘poor working girl.’ I’m not—I let you run along just to set the stage for telling you my opinion of you.”
Her voice was as dispassionate as that of a schoolgirl monotonously listing the products from Brazil. There were no heroics, no tears, but only a relentless cataloguing of the physical and mental defects of the would-be Casanova. He gasped.
“You little fool—you ought to feel proud that I, a white man, would even want you—a nigger!”
Her face flamed at the despised word but she kept her temper.
“I’m not surprised at your thinking that. I suppose even that such a notion is natural—you’ve made your own ideas about your own attractiveness and irresistibility and you’ve told yourself so often you’re invincible you believe it yourselves. Seducers of servant-girls! A noble accomplishment!”
Infuriated at her impassivity and her ridicule, so markedly a contrast to what he had assumed was complacence, he sought to seize her. She eluded him with the same coolness and remarked as she left the room: “It doesn’t really seem wise, does it, to create a scene in your own home where your wife is within hearing distance?”
A faint, mocking laugh trailed back to him as he stood there after she had gone. …
XIV
Mimi was not greatly surprised when she received a message that she would no longer be expected on Thursdays at the Germantown home. At first it amused her. Had she resorted to tears or pleading for release or any of the usual methods of damsels in defence of their virtue, she reflected, the curt note of dismissal would not have been sent. Man is a peculiar creature. So long as by implication or any
