Suppose I should marry him? I’d live in constant terror all my life, fearing that he would find out about Jean, about my race. The latter did not seem so important, but could she give up Jean forever? She knew she couldn’t. Fanciful plans sprang to her mind and as quickly were rejected. She thought of telling him Jean was a nephew, the child of some mythical and deceased sister or brother. No, she couldn’t do that—she couldn’t live a lie like that. She thought of leaving him with the family in County. They had learned to love him as their own child and had looked alarmed when she had mentioned that someday she would take him with her. She could establish a trust fund with all the money she possessed and insure at least reasonable comfort for him. No, that was impossible—she could never give him up that way.
Night after night she rolled and tossed and came no nearer a solution than before. Her eyes now had dark circles under them, she could not eat, she was nervous and irritable even to the customers. The knowledge that this state of affairs could not go on did not add to her comfort. And Jimmie Forrester would not be denied. He brought his mother to the shop to buy gowns but Mimi would not see them, sending word that she was frightfully busy and terribly sorry. …
Autumn and the rush season were upon her and she still wrestled with the riddle which seemed well-nigh insoluble to her. Mimi’s face had lost much of its colour, deep lines spread fan-like from the corners of her haggard eyes, from her body had gone much of its roundness. To her dismay she found that the more she struggled against the love which she feared, the more securely did it fasten its tentacles upon her. With her now was a stifling, strangling sensation as though she were held in the rib-cracking embrace of a boa constrictor who was crushing her in a room filled with acrid smoke. The passage of days and weeks and months had neither lessened her own distress, blissful in a measure though it was, nor had Jimmie Forrester’s zeal shown any sign of abatement. He resorted to telegrams, flowers, books. He used the mails to send proud but pleading letters asking her to permit him only to see her, to walk with her in the park, to go to the theatre or dinner. “Undoubtedly I’ve made myself a silly ass in your eyes,” he wrote her, “pursuing you, bombarding you, besieging you. My common sense tells me I should have taken refuge in pride and shown you that I can become angry enough never to see you again. I’ve even gone as far as to construct in my own mind little dramatic scenes when I loftily told you, after you had seen the devotion I offer you and had returned it in kind, that it was too late—your coldness has killed my love. And, like one of the old-style villains in a cheap melodrama, I have gloated as I saw you humble while I stood cold and impassive. Oh, yes, Mimi, I’ve gone through all this and more—more than ever a boy of sixteen in love for the first time has suffered.
“Yet I find that despite all I do to pluck you and the memory of you out of my heart I love you more devotedly every day that passes. Take pity, Mimi, just let me talk with you—see you, sit beside you and hear your voice. I know now there’s nothing you can do which can kill my love. I cannot understand why you act as you do—surely you do not hate me completely. If you won’t let me see you, won’t you write me just one little note and tell me why you have acted as you have?”
That night Mimi read the letter over and over again. She knew what it had cost him to write it—to make such confessions of his inability to stop loving her despite all she had done to kill that love. For a long time she sat by the window and gazed out into the quiet street below. The roar of the East Side elevated trains came faintly to her like the gentle rumbles of far-off thunder. One by one the little groups of children playing near at hand dispersed with shrill shouts of parting until the morrow. A slightly chilling breeze from the East River swayed the yellowish silk curtains lazily. Ever and again it bustled through the windows in little gusts that swept in and were gone. She heard leaves of paper on the table behind her blowing to the floor but she made no move to pick them up. Life for her
