“My dear, I’m an old woman now and I can’t make the trips I used to,” Madame Francine told Mimi after they had made their second trip to Paris. “It’s nice of you to deny my age,” she smiled at Mimi’s eager protestations that she was not old. “But it’s true, nevertheless, and I’ve got to shift even more of the burdens on you. Do you think you could go without me to Paris next time?”
With a woman’s eye for such signs, Mimi had noticed the telltale wrinkles in Madame Francine’s chin which, despite massages and all the other means she had used to retain her youth, had become each year more evident until now when she held her head at a certain angle they reminded Mimi of the neck of a plucked hen. Under Madame Francine’s eyes hung revealing pouches that of mornings were dark and wrinkled. Francine had had a desperate struggle to establish and maintain her position—the competition had been cruelly keen, any lessening of her efforts would have meant the swift relegation of the business she had built to a place in the rear of the procession. This strain was now telling on her. She was weary. She no longer was able to drive herself and those under her at high speed. Only the will to make Francine’s the place where smart New York came for its clothes remained. She would always keep a supervisory eye on the shop. But she was glad she had Mimi. Under her direction the pace would be maintained, Francine’s name would not die out, Francine’s gowns would yet be known as the last word in feminine circles.
Closely she had watched Mimi and she had been satisfied. She had given the younger woman many useful hints and her delight had known no bounds when these hints had been taken, elaborated, overhauled and embellished in such fashion the books had shown a decided increase in business transacted. Francine was forced to admit, though her confessions were rueful ones and kept to herself, that Mimi’s tactful handling of several wealthy customers who had been wont to buy the bulk of their wares at other modistes’ had resulted in the transfer of practically all their business to her own place. And there were, she noted, a number of women with wealth and little else, who under no circumstances would permit any other individual to advise with them on colours and fabrics and designs save Mimi. Madame Francine was content—Mimi would do. Someday, who knows but Mimi will be able to take her own place and she could with satisfied mind retire for the long rest and the leisurely life she had always promised herself?
XIX
The success she was achieving made Mimi happy, as was to be expected. The dark days in Atlanta, since Jean I had died, the pitiful and defeat-crowned struggle in Philadelphia, the abortive effort in Harlem to pull herself from the mire, and her flight away from her own people seemed now fantastic and unreal. At times they were to her almost as though she had read of them in a novel—one of those stories of a “poor working-girl beset by temptation and sin,” a story for backstairs consumption. At other times she shuddered when she realized all that she had been through, wondered how she had ever had the courage, the willpower to keep her head above the lashing, foaming waters instead of sinking restfully beneath them without struggle. Naturally, she was happy when Francine’s virtual surrender of the shop to her had been more than a promotion—it had been an accolade of victory.
But, as is the way of the world, that victory brought with it many things which were not so pleasant to think about. It had now been six years since she had left her Aunt Sophie. Those years had been filled to the brim, packed tight with work all day at a table in the shop, with evenings filled with school work and lectures varied only occasionally by a visit to the theatre or a concert, with dreary, lonely meals and solitary rooms where she had felt as though she were lodged in a cell. Of naturally strong and normal desires common to her sex and to humanity, she had had many bitter struggles with herself. There had been times when she wondered what use, what value there was to the unremitting routine to which she had condemned herself. She had been tempted—sorely tempted—to yield to the “one hour of glorious strife”—to find relief in some folly, some wild breaking of the bands which bound her with terrific solidity. Time and time again she had gone almost to the edge of the abyss and gazed fascinatedly down into the alluring depths below. But each time she had withdrawn in terror, her breath coming in little gasps of fear, every nerve rigid. Only her experiences which had brought to her such misery saved her, they and Petit Jean. She feared the possibility of letting herself be hurt again. Better anything than that, she whispered often to herself when alone in her room at night. And after each temptation she plunged with doubled zeal into her work, seeking to find an opiate there which would absorb the restless urge within her body.
When even work could not dull the ceaseless desires she felt, she would often walk at night through to her unknown and queer sections of the city, peering into doorways, watching the ways of the varied peoples that make of New York a world within itself, packed with races representative of every nook of the world. She rambled through districts where no word except Spanish was heard, ate in tiny
