Mimi was sustained by her elation at the ease with which she had escaped an unpleasant and possibly dangerous situation. She was glad she had retained her poise. She felt angry only when she remembered the nasty way in which he had implied and later definitely stated that in his opinion she should have been happy, being coloured, to have attracted his notice. For the first time she saw the reasons for Jean’s apprehension in those talks which seemed to have taken place so many years ago. Life for any woman who was unprotected and who sought to live up to certain ideals was hard. But when that woman was coloured she was more than ever at the mercy of those who were her constant pursuers. She found her old race-consciousness surging up again. Bitterness against the husband of her former employer welled in her not so much because he had assumed she would be amenable to his suggestions but more because he had so readily assumed that she, being coloured, would offer no objections whatever.
But when her joy in her victory and her bitterness at the vanquished had passed, she found that the revenue lost in this manner was seriously affecting her. She found other jobs but none of them were as regular nor did they pay as well. Every dollar counted, every fraction of a dollar earned or expended made a difference. Once or twice she had been a few days late in paying the rent for the small room in which she and Petit Jean lived. The lessened cordiality with which her landlady greeted her pleas for more time for payment made this an ordeal she avoided even when it meant, as it frequently did, the forgoing of meals for herself.
Petit Jean thrived and grew, singularly free from the maladies of childhood. With what to Mimi seemed amazing speed, his monthly birthdays sped by and accumulated—the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth. As long as he was well and clothed and fed, Mimi’s own difficulties seemed of little more than passing moment. Nothing greatly matters, she comforted herself, when seen in perspective—it is only when a thing is happening that it frightens and pains one. She found a new strength coming to her out of the problems and perplexities she was meeting. It was, she found, like looking into a mirror. When one did look the image was there and if one was sick or unhappy it gave back a reflection of that condition or mood. But as soon as one removed himself from a place in front of the looking-glass the image was gone. She consoled herself with this convenient philosophy and found in it a courage of which she would not have believed herself capable.
But inevitably there came to her periods of depression. Most frequently these occurred when she thought of Jean’s future. Suppose her own health failed. She could not go on indefinitely this way, common sense told her, going without food, improperly clothed, saving nothing. Her rather ample wardrobe which she had brought from Atlanta was nearly threadbare and she just could not afford to spend money on adornment for herself. Little garments for Jean, talcums, soaps, and the infinite variety of essentials which an infant required for his comfort took all she could earn and more.
It seldom occurred to her she could have asked and received aid from the Hunters, Mrs. Daquin or her Aunt Sophie. The idea at times of greatest need came fleetingly to her, hazily, but she resolutely put it from her mind before it could find lodgment there. Whatever else might come to her, she would never yield to such temptations, at least she would never permit herself to beg from her stepmother or Carl’s parents. To do so would have been surrender of the principle for which she had so bravely fought—the determination to keep her own soul free. However adroitly worded, a plea to them would have been admission of defeat, of her failure to make good the lofty words of determination she had spoken. She knew they did not understand the motives which had driven her on. In truth, she sometimes wondered if she herself knew them. But when she held Jean in her arms, when his toothless smile greeted her on her calling for him at the nursery, when his warm flesh rested against her side in bed, she was happy to a degree which she knew would never have been possible had she accepted the easier way out of her difficulties. No, despite all, she knew, her course had been the only one she could have taken in the face of Carl’s abject failure to measure up to the high qualities with which she had in fancy endowed him.
One extravagance, a pitifully small one, she permitted herself. In the late spring she passed an old secondhand book shop on a side street. She lingered at the weather-beaten old table outside the shop, fingering, examining, peeping into the battered and worn books displayed there. Volume after volume she looked into but most of them were dull and prosy stuff which bored her. She lingered so long the proprietor came to the door and stood there looking everywhere except at her, with too great casualness, Mimi reflected with a smile. It amused her to watch him with equal lack of obviousness, knowing that his suspiciousness led him to remain there. She named him “Old Scrooge,” for he looked as though he had stepped from Dickens’ pages with his fringe of dusty grey hair, his square, steel-rimmed spectacles, his baggy and nondescript clothing.
The game interested her and
