XXIII

it. Mimi suddenly hated him for using the detested word. She checked the remark which sprang to her lips⁠—that the swinish guzzling was being done only at the tables at which white people sat. She was amazed at the sudden rekindling of the race-consciousness which had lain dormant for nearly ten years. I’m silly, she chided herself, for after all what difference does it make what a man is called? But immediately there came the answer that it apparently made a great deal of difference, whether one wanted it to or not. She watched the dancers. The floor was crowded mostly with white couples executing all sorts of fancy steps, swaying and bumping the others in their gyrations. Here and there a coloured couple moved with unconscious grace, a rhythmic sweep to their bodies that made the others seem awkward and graceless. She commented on the fact to Bert, whose answer was: “Yeah, all the showgirls down town come up here and get stuff for Broadway.” And as she watched them Mimi began to see for the first time what Wu Hseh-Chuan had meant⁠—it had taken an Oriental from halfway around the world to make her see things she had seen all her life and yet had never seen.