And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this child-like trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in “kingdom come.” Sary Jones’s absolute conviction, “In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’,” came back to her. And ten million souls were as sure of it as was Sary. How the white man’s God must laugh at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them bear it unre sistingly, uncomplainingly almost, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky by and by.

“Pie in the sky,”1 Helga said aloud derisively, forgetting for the moment Miss Hartley’s brisk presence, and so was a little startled at hearing her voice from the adjoining room saying severely: “My goodness! No! I should say you can’t have pie. It’s too indigestible. Maybe when you’re better—”

“That,” assented Helga, “is what I said. Pie—by and by. That’s the trouble.”

The nurse looked concerned. Was this an approaching relapse? Coming to the bedside, she felt at her patient’s pulse while giving her a searching look. No. “You’d better,” she admonished, a slight edge to her tone, “try to get a little nap. You haven’t had any sleep today, and you can’t get too much of it. You’ve got to get strong, you know.”

With this Helga was in full agreement. It seemed hundreds of years since she had been strong. And she would need strength. For in some way she was determined to get herself out of this bog into which she had strayed. Or—she would have to die. She couldn’t endure it. Her suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great. Not to be borne. Again. For she had to admit that it wasn’t new, this feeling of dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced before. In Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen. This differed only in degree. And it was of the present and therefore seemingly more reasonable. The other revulsions were of the past, and now less explainable.

The thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred. At his every approach she had forcibly to subdue a furious inclination to scream out in protest. Shame, too, swept over her at every thought of her marriage. Marriage. This sacred thing of which parsons and other Christian folk ranted so sanctimoniously, how immoral—according to their own standards—it could be! But Helga felt also a modicum of pity for him, as for one already abandoned. She meant to leave him. And it was, she had to concede, all of her own doing, this marriage. Nevertheless, she hated him.