So too, in addition to Aunt Sophie’s friends, who soon became her friends as well, she and her aunt found great joy in modest excursions down town to the theatres and greater happiness in music. They purchased the cheapest seats available and climbed the innumerable stairs at the Metropolitan or at Carnegie Hall to hear a favourite opera or singer. To Mimi these were as drugs or liquor to addicts—they swept her up, up above her narrow, difficult existence to a world where cares and sorrows and toils did not exist, where there was an ecstatic abandon to the intoxicating music that thrilled her so. She would have enjoyed the music under any circumstances but it gave her greater happiness because she knew she could not afford even these inexpensive and harmless debauches. It was her aunt who urged her to take them, who frequently paid for the tickets, telling Mimi they had been given to her because of Mimi’s insistence upon bearing an equal share of all costs of their journeys. On this point they often had good-natured quarrels—Mimi had a violent hatred of sponging, of feeling under obligations to any person, even to one so near as her aunt. She knew her aunt had obligations she must meet, rental of her apartment and shop, the current expenses at both places, the care of her sister-in-law, a chronic invalid who seldom left her room and who played as little a part in the household as the decrepit chair in the closet on which old newspapers were piled. She was unwilling to add further to her aunt’s burdens and insisted upon paying for her room and board as though she had been merely a boarder. …
Another spring came and went, this time a happier one than Mimi had known for several years, merged imperceptibly into summer, when the only variations she permitted to her regular routine of work were trips to Coney Island with her aunt and some of their friends or rides down town and back of an evening on the Fifth Avenue buses. Mimi had decided that she could never make the progress which was so necessary if she continued only to do plain sewing. She always had a knack for devising new and unusual designs, many of them impractical but all of them touched with a distinctiveness that separated them from other clothes. She began in the fall a course in designing at a trade school, taking the course in the evenings. Despite the uneventfulness of her life and the steadiness of her application to the uninspiring routine, her health improved, colour returned to her cheeks, and her face lost its worried, haggard look. For Mimi was sustained by the goal towards which she was pushing—all else seemed trivial and unimportant beside the reaching of the day when she could bring Petit Jean to her again.
XVI
Mimi forgot the days of her misery. The years spent in Atlanta became hazy and unreal in the eager happiness of her new life. Again she had the feeling that the things which had distressed her so had never really happened—that they were either the phantasmagoria of a nightmare or the sorrows of an existence she had lived prior to this life. Her stepmother she rarely thought of, she had returned to Chicago and there had married again. The Hunters she equally had removed from her thoughts. When she did think of them or of Carl they seemed unreal, like apparitions of an indistinctly remembered dream. She had completely recovered from even her hatred of and contempt for Carl. In the light of her life since she had left Atlanta, she saw him now even more clearly as the weak individual he was. She was amused now when she remembered how devotedly, how passionately she had loved him during those short months. “I was a silly little fool then,” she laughed amusedly at herself when she did remember. The entire episode seemed to her now a rather cheap and worthless thing. The only comfort she could extract from it was the satisfaction that she had not succumbed to a dishonest compromise.
Even her years in Philadelphia began to fade into the land of half-remembered, half-forgotten things. She occasionally corresponded with the Mannings but as the months sped by she found her interest lessening even in this contact with the old couple who had been so kind to her. The one link to both of these episodes in her life, for she now looked upon them only as episodes, was Petit Jean, and he served as a link and as the centre of all her hopes for the future. Under the skilful guidance of her aunt she had thrown off her moroseness and spells of despondency and was working indefatigably towards securing all the things which would bring happiness to her and Jean.
Back of her lay disappointment and sadness, ahead of her lay only hope. It was in this mood that she went with her aunt one Friday evening to a dance at Manhattan Casino. They had been invited to join a box party in which were included several younger people, three or four young men and three girls beside Mimi, in addition to Mrs. Rogers and two older persons. For the dance Mimi had made for herself a party dress of pale green charmeuse-green with the greenness of young leaves in springtime—a green that was indefinably between jade and Eau-de-Nil.
“You look like a rosebud—a marvellously golden flower springing out of its leafy greenness,” Tom Henderson whispered to her as they danced together.
The not very subtle compliment pleased Mimi. She was happy, too, she was capable of pleasure from such a source—she had thought herself impervious to
