“Mimi, that’s how I feel today,” said Jean softly. “Leaving New Orleans, the old houses, the old friends—it makes me feel as though it were I in that coffin—”
“Papa, why don’t you put your foot down?” burst out Mimi; “tell Mme. Daquin you just won’t go—let her go on back to Chicago if she doesn’t like it—and you and I stay here and be happy?”
“It’s too late now, petite Mimi,” he answered. “My word’s been given—they’re tearing down so many of the old houses—my old friends are dying off, one by one—”
“But you’re not old! You’re only fifty-two, yet you talk as though you were a hundred—”
“Sometimes I feel a hundred—a thousand. Oh, well, I’ve made my decision and I’ll stick to it. It wasn’t about that I wanted to talk with you. It’s related to it but—but it isn’t easy to talk about—” he broke off.
They walked slowly in silence as she waited for him to speak. An inexpressible tenderness filled her for this gentle old man—he seemed very old to her today. The growing surliness and quarrelsomeness of her stepmother, the alien who would never fit into the scheme of things as she and Jean knew it, infuriated her for the pain it was causing her dear Jean. She felt within her a steadily growing bitterness against Mary and her petty shopkeeper attitude, her scorn for traditions so dear to Jean and herself. As she had dressed, the notion of leaving New Orleans (she had never been more than a few miles beyond the city’s limits) had appealed to her, offering as it did new experiences, new scenes, new people, naturally attractive to a girl of fourteen. Her mind had dwelt more on the favourable aspects of the change than on the severance of old and dear ties of tradition and friendship, of quitting familiar scenes, with all the instinctive optimism and disregard of consequences of youth.