I suppose I’ll have to admit Mary and her father are right—they do put things over. Mr. Hunter’s the best of the lot—and, well, I suppose in time I’ll get myself fitted into the groove—” he ended lamely.
“You’re whistling in the dark to keep up your courage!” Mimi challenged him. “You’re not happy here and you never will be.”
“Not entirely so, I am afraid, but—well, I’ll be contented after a fashion,” Jean smiled bravely. “I miss the old houses, the old ways. I’d give anything almost to walk once more down to the Basin, to sit in St. Louis cemetery—do you remember the gold and green lizards scampering round, in and out of the vines over the graves, that day we walked and talked there, Mimi? I miss the calmness, the placidity, the smell of the water. Here things are rushing, bustling, matter-of-fact. I feel as if some power has pulled me out of a quiet pool where I was lying on my back floating on the water and thrown me head first into a deadly revolving whirlpool.
“And what are they getting out of all this, these minnows who are squirming and fighting each other?” he demanded with the old gesture of questioning she knew so well. “Here are these coloured people with the gifts from God of laughter and song and of creative instincts—do you remember that man who sang as he went past the house our first night in Atlanta?—and what are they doing with it? They are aping the white man—becoming a race of moneygrubbers with ledgers and money tills for brains and Shylock hearts.”
“But, papa Jean, they’ve got to do it! They’re living in a world where they must either make money or else perish.”
“No—no—Mimi! You don’t understand what I mean. The whole world’s gone mad over power and wealth. The strongest man wins, not the most decent or the most intelligent or the best. All the old virtues of comradeship and art and literature and philosophy, in short, all the