suppressed anger, said. “Furthermore, I resent your words ‘even if you didn’t do anything but what you said.’ ”
The two women glared at each other across the table. But Mrs. Daquin’s anger was beyond the heeding of the danger signs in Mimi’s eyes.
“Young woman, you can’t—”
“Mary, keep quiet!” Jean half rose from the table, his hands pressed against it with such force all the blood had fled from his knuckles. “Mimi has told me what happened and that’s enough.”
Jean’s voice held a note which even Mary in her anger could not help but respect and fear.
“But, Jean dear,” she pleaded, her tone changing miraculously, “I’m only thinking of our good name—”
“Damn your good name!” the unfamiliar Jean snapped. “I’m sick and tired of your petty bickering with these little folks you’re so mad about—these busybodies so worried keeping track of other people and meddling into their affairs. As for this present matter, I want it stopped right here. Whether Mimi acted right or not, she’s told us what’s happened and that’s enough of it. Do you hear me?”
It was a long speech for Jean and it was not often that he permitted himself to become so angry: He did not know it but it gave him the opportunity of expressing his opinion of these aliens, so different to those of his own New Orleans whom he missed more and more. And his nostalgia was none the less potent and painful because he knew that even had he remained in New Orleans he would not have been happy. Just as when a man dies, his good traits or those good traits given him by popular belief are magnified after his death and his faults are minimized