“Try, Helga, to control yourself,” he had urged gently. He detested tears. “If it distresses you so, we won’t talk of it again. You, of course, must do as you yourself wish. Both your aunt and I want only that you should be happy.” He had wanted to make an end of this fruitless wet conversation.

Helga had made another little dab at her face with the scrap of lace and raised shining eyes to his face. She had said, with sincere regret: “You’ve been marvelous to me, you and Aunt Katrina. Angelic. I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I’d do anything for you, anything in the world but this.”

Herr Dahl had shrugged. A little sardonically he had smiled. He had refrained from pointing out that this was the only thing she could do for them, the only thing that they had asked of her. He had been too glad to be through with the uncomfortable discussion.

So life went on. Dinners, coffees, theaters, pictures, music, clothes. More dinners, coffees, theaters, clothes, music. And that nagging aching for America increased. Augmented by the uncom fortableness of Aunt Katrina’s and Uncle Poul’s disappointment with her, that tormenting nostalgia grew to an unbearable weight. As spring came on with many gracious tokens of following summer, she found her thoughts straying with increasing frequency to Anne’s letter and to Harlem, its dirty streets, swollen now, in the warmer weather, with dark, gay humanity.

Until recently she had had no faintest wish ever to see America again. Now she began to welcome the thought of a return. Only a visit, of course. Just to see, to prove to herself that there was nothing there for her. To demonstrate the absurdity of even thinking that there could be. And to relieve the slight tension here. Maybe when she came back—

Her definite decision to go was arrived at with almost bewildering suddenness. It was after a concert at which Dvorák’s “New World Symphony” had been wonderfully rendered. Those wailing undertones of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”3 were too poignantly familiar. They struck into her longing heart and cut away her weakening defenses. She knew at least what it was that had lurked formless and undesignated these many weeks in the back of her troubled mind. Incompleteness.

“I’m homesick, not for America, but for Negroes. That’s the trouble.”