wonder how you ever managed to stick in that dead old hole of New Orleans.”
Mr. Robertson’s words came to Mimi sharply as his voice rose. He took a fat cigar from his pocket, bit the end from it and tossed the severed bit through the open window. She disliked this bossy old man intensely. She looked at Jean, wondering that he so calmly submitted to the dictatorial attitude of the man who, though his father-in-law, was not many years his senior. But Jean heard his words only vaguely, if he heard them at all. He sat beside his wife’s father on the couch that matched the chair on which Mimi perched and gazed through the window, the thin white curtains opening and closing as a faint breeze stirred them. Somewhere outside, a voice, throaty but rich, plaintively sang of his woes and his “blues”:
“I’m jes’ as misabul as I can be, I’m unhappy even if I am free, I’m feelin’ down, I’m feelin’ blue; I wander round, don’t know what to do. I’m go’na lay mah haid on de railroad line, Let de B. & O. come and pacify mah min’.”