This was not because of stupidity, it was because of Mimi’s amazing innocence of life. She had never fully realized why there should have been so much talk regarding the visit she and Carl had paid to the dance hall. The people she saw there she knew were not of her class nor were they of the kind she ever encountered. Margot and Jean had closely guarded Mimi from all influences which they felt might contaminate her mind. They had seen to it that her playmates were from families which observed identically the same customs and beliefs as did the Daquins. At school Mimi had heard phrases which would have shocked her had she understood their import but, knowing nothing of what they meant, she had given them no particular thought.
The same circumstance had existed during the years in Atlanta, where it was considered highly immoral to mention even the most rudimentary facts about oneself. Mimi had asked questions but these had been more or less skillfully evaded. She had asked only once about certain amazingly distressing things she noticed in her body and the answer to that query, implying as it did that she had said something she should not have mentioned, had sealed her lips. But in her own mind she had wondered at and been distressed by these things, by periods of intense depression when the most minor incident made her cry or laugh. Thus Mrs. Hunter’s dark suggestions regarding Carl’s deviations meant little to her and she wondered that his own mother and father could be so lacking in control over him that she had to appeal to her to help save him.
“I asked Carl at church two weeks ago,” she began, Mrs. Hunter meanwhile waiting anxiously for Mimi’s decision, “why he never came to see us anymore and he told me he didn’t want to.”
“Oh, please, Mimi,” the mother pleaded, begging almost piteously for her boy, “ask him again and again until he does come. You can save him—if you will.”