“His house!” She was glowing now with it. “I think he is—I think he is—to have one of them—and even if he likes it, not to remember—cannot speak about him!” she wound up “I should say unbecoming things.” She had walked out, during these words, from behind the counter and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge. Then, admirably, she put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. “Why can’t somebody explain it to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling—you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you—do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?” She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.
“By Jove, Miss La Heu!” I exclaimed, “you put it so that it’s rather hard to answer.”
“I’m glad it strikes you so.”
“But did it make them all think they were going to dine?”
“Hundreds of thousands. It was proof to them that they were as good as anybody—just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut, like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him—only the monkey doesn’t push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know,” said Miss La Heu, softening down from wrath to her roguish laugh, “isn’t the right state of mind for racial progress! But I wasn’t thinking of this. You know he has appointed one of them to office here.”
A light entered my brain: John Mayrant had a position at the Custom House! John Mayrant was subordinate to the President’s appointee! She hadn’t changed the subject so violently, after all.
I came squarely at it. “And so you wish him to resign his position?”
But I was ahead of her this time.
“The Chief of Customs?” she wonderingly murmured.
I brought her up with me now. “Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was over his left eye?”