That he might be forced to sit in a segregated section of the church had occurred to Jean. Of late years that custom had grown in popularity even in New Orleans in the churches not attended wholly by Negroes. But that he might be refused even admittance had been a terrific shock from which he never completely recovered. Mrs. Daquin had said nothing, but a faint smile which seemed to Mimi to shout exultantly: “I told you so!” wreathed her face. Mrs. Hunter’s gentle hints that “the” church to attend was the Congregational had not fallen on barren ground. It was not long therefore before Sunday morning found her and Mimi and Jean in one of the pews there. …
Not many months passed before Mrs. Daquin was as much at home as though she had lived since birth in Atlanta. Mimi, too, was accepted in time, though with reservations. Her affection for Hilda was so apparent there was no mistaking that she esteemed her above all the other girls she met. Both of them had completed their grammar-school careers when Mimi came to Atlanta—both entered high school at Atlanta University in the same class that fall. They walked to school together and they walked home together. They confided each to the other their innermost secrets, they aired their grievances against whatever displeased either of them, secure in the knowledge that the other would understand and would be in complete sympathy. There came, of course, little differences, but these soon evaporated in the warm surge of reconciliation.
This very friendship in a manner prevented Mimi’s acceptance into the fold of complete conformity. Mrs. Adams was invited to all the parties and she in turn did her share of entertaining. But always there was an air of detachment in her social relations she seemed merely to be going through the motions of things which did not greatly interest her, if indeed she did not derive a kind of quiet amusement from the frantic efforts to out-entertain each other.
Instead of attempting to serve courses more in number and elaborateness, to decorate her house more gorgeously than the member