Jean Daquin, improvident, oblivious of material advantage or disadvantage of any act of his, had opened to her eyes a new world filled with romance, with colour, with beauty. This, combined with the stories told her of his grief over Margot, had appealed to her feminine love of the unstable, the exotic, the unusual. Unconsciously she associated with Jean the exciting revelry of Mardi Gras, and found herself in love with him.
Jean, floundering in the abyss of sorrow, was, in his more sober moments, beginning to develop a new fear when he met Mary Robertson—an apprehension regarding Mimi.
“I’m a poor excuse for a father, chérie ,” he told her a score of times a day despite her sincere protestations that he was the best father any girl ever had. “Here I am, drinking every night until I’m beastly drunk and forgetting Margot would want me to brace up for your sake. I’m no good at all—you’d be better off if I were dead, too.”
Here he would pause for the denial of his words which Mimi never failed to furnish. He would listen comfortably while she pointed out his virtues as a paterfamilias—and an hour later would be as unconvinced as ever. Mary determined she would capture Jean, distaste for her life in Chicago growing daily as she stayed on in New Orleans long after she had originally intended to leave. She was beguiled by the romance and languorous charm of the Creole quarter where she, for the first time, could forget the petty meanness and prejudice she felt as a Negro elsewhere in America. Mary Robertson swiftly but without Jean’s realizing it led him to propose to her.
To him, blundering along like a pilotless balloon, blown unresistingly this way or that by every passing breeze, she seemed the embodiment of all the virtues he himself lacked. Energetic, purposeful, dynamic, she