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Incisive Mr. Robertson kissed Mary and Mimi brusquely, shook hands with Jean and hustled them through the waitingroom labeled "For Coloured" to the sidewalk where a horse-drawn surrey was waiting.

"No—No," shouted Mr. Robertson as the driver started down the street. "Go around by Pryor Street and from there down Auburn Avenue." To the Daquins he explained: "If he'd gone that way he'd have carried you through Decatur and Ivy Streets—that's the slum district—saloons and houses———" He paused significantly, looking at Mimi. "Pretty bad," he added. "Lowest kind of Negroes."

But Mimi did not hear him nor even the newsboy who ran alongside the cab shouting: "Extry! All about the Japs licking the Rooshians! All about th' big battle!" Because it was terra incognita to her she tried to see everything as eagerly as she had watched the land from the car window in the long ride from New Orleans. Spring was in the air. The cab, to the accompaniment of various cluckings, "giddaps," "go-long-theres" of the ancient driver, joggled and bounced over the Belgian block pavement. Mimi sniffed the air eagerly, anticipatorily.

The carriage rumbled and jerked through the ghostly confines of shut business houses, turned into Auburn Avenue lined with blowzy boarding-houses, their porches lined with men and women, a loud, staccato, mirthless laugh occasionally floating on the breeze. Soon the scene changed. Black and brown and yellow faces replaced the white, the laughs became more frequent, more rich, more spontaneous. The April evening seemed more filled with the sheer joy of living. To Mimi the sudden change was pleasant, warming, inviting. Jean, sunk dejectedly in the seat beside the driver so that only the top of his black, crumpled felt hat showed above the high seat, was too engrossed in delightfully painful nostalgia for his New Orleans to notice anything. Mary and her father