She was pale, with a peculiar, almost deathlike pallor. The brilliantly red, softly curving mouth was somehow sorrowful. Her pitch-black eyes, a little aslant, were veiled by long, drooping lashes and surmounted by broad brows, which seemed like black smears. The short dark hair was brushed severely back from the wide forehead. The extreme décolleté of her simple apricot dress showed a skin of unusual color, a delicate, creamy hue, with golden tones. “Almost like an alabaster,” thought Helga.

Bang! Again the music died. The moving mass broke, separated. The others returned. Anne had rage in her eyes. Her voice trembled as she took Helga aside to whisper: “There’s your Dr. Anderson over there, with Audrey Denney.”

“Yes, I saw him. She’s lovely. Who is she?”

“She’s Audrey Denney, as I said, and she lives downtown.5 West Twenty-second Street. Hasn’t much use for Harlem any more. It’s a wonder she hasn’t some white man hanging about. The disgusting creature! I wonder how she inveigled Anderson? But that’s Audrey! If there is any desirable man about, trust her to attach him. She ought to be ostracized.”

“Why?” asked Helga curiously, noting at the same time that three of the men in their own party had deserted and were now congregated about the offending Miss Denney.

“Because she goes about with white people,” came Anne’s indignant answer, “and they know she’s colored.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite see, Anne. Would it be all right if they didn’t know she was colored?”

“Now, don’t be nasty, Helga. You know very well what I mean.” Anne’s voice was shaking. Helga didn’t see, and she was greatly interested, but she decided to let it go. She didn’t want to quarrel with Anne, not now, when she had that guilty feeling about leaving her. But Anne was off on her favorite subject, race. And it seemed, too, that Audrey Denney was to her particularly obnoxious.

“Why, she gives parties for white and colored people together. And she goes to white people’s parties. It’s worse than disgusting, it’s positively obscene.”

“Oh, come, Anne, you haven’t been to any of the parties, I know, so how can you be so positive about the matter?”

“No, but I’ve heard about them. I know people who’ve been.”

“Friends of yours, Anne?”

Anne admitted that they were, some of them.

“Well, then, they can’t be so bad. I mean, if your friends sometimes go, can they? Just what goes on that’s so terrible?”

“Why, they drink, for one thing. Quantities, they say.”

“So do we, at the parties here in Harlem,” Helga responded. An idiotic impulse seized her to leave the place, Anne’s presence, then, forever. But of course she couldn’t. It would be foolish, and so ugly.