Sylvia’s face, dark and in moments of intense feeling strong with the mark of Israel upon it, lighted up as she looked down the years and saw herself sitting as Francine now did in a delicately beautiful “studio” of her own, while all around her bustled employees of Madame Sylvia.
“Take Francine, for instance. She says she is French, but you and I are lots more French than she is—every time she opens her mouth and spills some French words, you can hear Killarney all through it. And if she can get away with it, well, I can put it over, too.”
Under Sylvia’s direction Mimi began to see new worlds in New York she had never thought of penetrating. At first to occupy her mind, later because the pursuit of knowledge was an intriguing and comforting thing, she began to spend her evenings at night school. She finished her course in designing, she studied French, soon regaining her old-time proficiency in the tongue which had once been more native to her than English, she took courses in English literature and economics and psychology. With Sylvia she attended lectures at the Rand School and at Cooper Union. Most of the theories advanced there seemed to her visionary and impractical—the burning intensity of most of the students and hearers frightened and repelled her. Like alchemists of old searching, probing, seeking diligently for the mysterious and elusive secret by which baser metals could be changed into gold, so many of these seemed intent on finding some panacea which could be applied willy-nilly to all problems, economic, social, political, and in a flash solve them all. Though she kept her thoughts to herself, nevertheless the test tube in which she tried all these solutions and solvers was in their reactions towards Mimi’s own people—her own, even though she had deserted them. Do they include consideration of the Negro as a human being just like themselves when they talk glibly of the “comrades” and “the brotherhood of man”? was the question she found herself constantly asking.