“Forgive me, papa. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.” Mimi caught him as he started to the door, tray in hand, and kissed him warmly. Even as he forgave her, he was troubled at the moist softness of her lips.
“After breakfast we’ll go for a walk down to the Basin. I’ll tell you all about it then and a lot of other things I’ve been planning to tell you for a long time. Don’t be long now!” he cautioned as he left the room.
Mimi smiled as she heard his carpet slippers pat-pat-patting down the hall. Poor, gentle, lovable old Jean. He would never learn the combination to the intricately devised safe called Life, Mimi thought for the thousandth time. Fumbling in his aimless way, living in a world of his own filled with ghostly figures of silken clad ladies and velvet garmented gentlemen—Mandevilles, Marignys, de Pontalbas and Gayarres—he would never understand nor master bustle and hurry and pep of the newer years.
She did not consciously think these things as she dressed hurriedly, yet Mimi sensed that Jean was living in a day that had passed and would never return. Though her stepmother irritated her almost to frenzy, Mimi was aware of the fact that Mme. Daquin was better armed for present-day life than either Jean or herself. She who was Mary Robertson of Chicago, American for many generations, was unencumbered with the hoary traditions which kept Jean with his pride of Creole ancestry content with his dreams, caring little whether his house was better furnished than those of his neighbours and friends, worrying not at all and wholly free from envy if his bank balance was more or less than the man’s next door.
Mimi often wondered what course their lives might have taken had her mother lived. And even as she wondered she knew the answer—Jean and her mother and she would have lived on and on and on in the old house on Dumaine Street until Jean and Margot had died and Mimi had