decision of her life, she may have been foolish but not faithless. She fell asleep whispering: “That the powerful play goes on, and I, Mimi Daquin , may contribute a verse.”
The words gave her a comforting sense of direction. She had been blindly wandering, groping, striving towards a goal that had never been clear, indeed she had never even vaguely visualized any destination other than the struggle to do those things which seemed to her to be right. Even for this indefinite rightness or wrongness she had no tangible definition—she sought only by instinct or conscience or some other indefinable guide the path to truth and beauty and happiness. …
This new consciousness gave her faith and courage at a time when she needed these things more than she had ever needed them before. Summer came with the usual migration of the few regular customers she had to the seashore or the mountains. Mimi no longer called on the Mannings, for she could no longer conceal even from their unsuspecting eyes the extent of her distress. She saved the small fee at the day nursery, for it was seldom now that she had to be away from home. Her rent was several weeks overdue and the relations between Mimi and her landlady had reached an actually strained point.
“Stuck-up niggers think they can sponge off of common ones—humph! I’ll show her she can’t make no footmat out of me!” she overheard her landlady saying to her husband one evening. “An’ I ain’t never been satisfied she’s respectable—if that baby’s got a daddy he must have had some relatives she could get money from. I’m tired of foolin’ with her and if she don’t pay me by Sad’dy I’m goin’ to put her and her baby right out there in the street!”
Sick at heart, hungry, discouraged, Mimi slowly struggled up the stairs to her room. Even Petit Jean’s coos of welcome could not cheer her up. She lay on the bed beside him and wept.