scourged herself and despised herself for her weakness, she knew she wouldn’t scrub floors or wash dishes. There’s Jean to think of, was her dominant thought. But she resolved she’d get out of the whole business and work at home when she had earned and saved the money she must have. Miss Lawrence had done it and some of her customers had followed her all the way to Negro Harlem. She could do it too—perhaps open a shop of her own as Sylvia had done.
She was glad she had done nothing so foolish when a few days after Christmas she stood on deck and watched the serrated skyline of New York, clad mistily in a blanket of snow that fell like a great celestial curtain, drop silently in the distance. The thrill and mystery of departure no longer of interest to her, Madame Francine had already gone to her stateroom, while Percival Edwards, the sketch artist, had fallen an easy victim to seasickness before the hawsers had been cast off and the huge ship had nosed its way from its slip. The long, dark pier with its distinctive odour of things nautical, the crowds of passengers and of others who had come to bid them a snowy and chilly farewell, the trim officers of the luxurious vessel that seemed so immense—Mimi felt an immediate sense of security replacing her fear of the sea, all these excited and delighted Mimi. Only in short trips of a few hours on the Gulf of Mexico before they had left New Orleans had Mimi ever before been on a ship. Those little boats of her childhood could have been stored away and forgotten in the hold of this huge boat, she reflected, as the shore became fainter and fainter in the greyish white curtain of snowflakes. She drew her shoulders deeper into the collar of her fur coat until there was but a thin slit of creamy flesh visible between the collar and the tight-fitting little toque that covered her head. This is life, she thought comfortably. A big liner, Paris, the boulevards, the shops, the theatres, the opera, the restaurants, all the life of la plus belle ville du monde —the phrase came to her from the textbook she had used but a short time before. …