Chapter 19: XIX

XIX The success she was achieving made Mimi happy, as was to be expected. The dark days in Atlanta, since Jean I had died, the pitiful and defeat-crowned struggle in Philadelphia, the abortive effort in Harlem to pull herself from the mire, and her flight away from her own people seemed now fantastic and unreal. At times they were to her almost as though she had read of them in a novel—one of those stories of a “poor working-girl beset by temptation and sin,” a story for backstairs consumpti…