Through streets where naught but gaily clad Gipsies with brightly coloured dresses and midnight-black hair, with sparkling yet mysterious eyes and gold necklaces and bracelets, were seen. She loved the touches of colour they gave to rows of dilapidated and abandoned stores through the hanging of vivid strips of Turkish gauzes and calicoes across the dusty windows, the thronging of the streets of lovemaking young girls and boys, of surprisingly agile old women and stalwart men with fierce and terrifyingly strange faces. Or perhaps she wandered on the lower East Side through streets packed from curb to curb with Jews, arguing, strolling slowly of an evening under the garish lights from stores selling jewellery and clothing and food and amusement. Sometimes she ate in a restaurant on Houston Street where she could obtain white caviar and strange, exotic dishes served nowhere else, while the proprietor, who had come to America from Romania, played the cymbalom, accompanied by a pathetic old blind man. She found down here a new standard of appraisal of these people, who, if for no other reason than that they, like her own race, had known bitter persecution, appealed to her with colour and romance and kindred emotions. She was often repelled by the bustling, noisy, aggressive younger generation, forever concerned with profits and losses. But the older generation, the women of the calm eyes and heavy wigs, the men with magnificent beards and extraordinarily well-formed features, appealed to her more than almost any other type she had ever seen.
Through the Italian section she wandered along sidewalks littered with fruit and vegetable stands, listening to voices singing to guitar accompaniment songs of Venice and Genoa and Naples. Diminutive Sicilians slithered past her in the shadows, huge Calabrians swaggered, haughty and handsome men and women from Milan and Tuscania occasionally strode proudly by. But most of all she loved the lightness and gaiety of the streets where the French lived, to listen to their gay lovemaking and the delicately beautiful songs which flowed forth as naturally as did the speech which she understood and loved. She sat in cafés and lazily watched men and women playing bezique at the small tables as they sipped greenish drinks from tall glasses. Shamelessly she eavesdropped on conversations regarding the merits of Anatole France as a writer whose work would live, whether the poetry of Mallarmé or Villon were to be esteemed as highly as some would have it, whether there was any city in the world, past or present or future, which had, has or might have the charm of Paris, whether there had ever been an artist who ranked with Yvette Guilbert. All, all these Mimi loved, not alone because in these varied scenes she could forget her own perplexities, but because they were lovable and exotic and charming in themselves. …
Her rise to the position where she was second in command of the rapidly expanding business brought other problems to Mimi no less serious than her own wishes and desires. At Francine’s she had been known as Miss Daquin from the beginning. This had not mattered a great deal, now that she was the virtual head of the establishment. She had long since moved to her own apartment near Gramercy Park but embarrassing explanations would have been necessary had she brought Jean to her. Those could have been met in time but again she worried over the decision as to what would be best for him.
She had partially solved that problem by removing him from the orphanage and placing him with a family in Westchester County where she could see him frequently and where she could direct the training he should receive in the kindly French family with whom he lived. She chose this plan, for she knew that her long hours at the shop, the multiple duties of evenings, and her three months each year in Paris would effectively prevent her from giving Jean the guidance and care that a boy of twelve needed. She ruthlessly put aside her own wishes, plucking them out as though they were malignant growths which health demanded should be uncompromisingly destroyed. She sought only to consider the things which would be of greatest good to him. The change from Baltimore to Westchester County made her happier but yet there was the ceaseless longing to have him near—aching and unappeasable yearning for him that could not be stilled. …
She saw Mrs. Rogers several times a year but her aunt was the only coloured person now a part of her life. There had been a number of coloured girls who at one time or the other applied for work under her when she was a fitter. These she had put to the same tests that she gave to the others—if they measured up to them, they were employed—if not, they were refused. At first when such applications had come she had been fearful—had debated whether or not she could take the risk of employing one who might have known or seen her when she lived in Harlem and who might start talking. She had often heard, without giving much thought to the matter, that usually when coloured persons went white, in order to prove their whiteness, they were more anti-Negro than anybody else. When she was faced with the problem herself she understood more fully what lay back of that feeling—she was not altogether free from it herself. But she had employed them and there
