The success she was achieving made Mimi happy, as was to be expected. The dark days in Atlanta, since Jean I had died, the pitiful and defeat-crowned struggle in Philadelphia, the abortive effort in Harlem to pull herself from the mire, and her flight away from her own people seemed now fantastic and unreal. At times they were to her almost as though she had read of them in a novel—one of those stories of a “poor working-girl beset by temptation and sin,” a story for backstairs consumption. At other times she shuddered when she realized all that she had been through, wondered how she had ever had the courage, the willpower to keep her head above the lashing, foaming waters instead of sinking restfully beneath them without struggle. Naturally, she was happy when Francine’s virtual surrender of the shop to her had been more than a promotion—it had been an accolade of victory.
But, as is the way of the world, that victory brought with it many things which were not so pleasant to think about. It had now been six years since she had left her Aunt Sophie. Those years had been filled to the brim, packed tight with work all day at a table in the shop, with evenings filled with school work and lectures varied only occasionally by a visit to the theatre or a concert, with dreary, lonely meals and solitary rooms where she had felt as though she were lodged in a cell. Of naturally strong and normal desires common to her sex and to humanity, she had had many bitter struggles with herself. There had been times when she wondered what use, what value there was to the unremitting routine to which she had condemned herself. She had been tempted—sorely tempted—to yield to the “one hour of glorious strife”—to find relief in some folly, some wild breaking of the bands which bound her with terrific solidity. Time and time again she had gone almost to the edge of the abyss and gazed fascinatedly down into the alluring depths below.