the colour of the hair was almost the same but the way it was dressed made a lot of difference, and she said so.

“Well, they did their hair different then,” replied Miss Pinckney, “and that reminds me, it’s near time you put that tail up.” She sat down in a rocker by the window and with her hands on her knees contemplated Phyl. “I’m your only female relative, and Lord knows I’m far enough off, anyhow I’m something with a skirt on it, and brains in its head, and that’s what a girl most wants when she comes to your age. You’ll be asked to parties and things here and you’ll find that tail in the way; it’s good enough for a schoolgirl, but you aren’t 137 that any longer. I’ll get Dinah to do your hair, something simple and not too grown-up—you don’t mind an old woman telling you this—do you?”

137

“Indeed I don’t,” said Phyl. “I don’t care how my hair is done, you can cut it off if you like, but I don’t want to go to parties.”

“Well, maybe you don’t,” said Miss Pinckney, “but, all the same, we’ll get Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she’d get twice the wages as a lady’s maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she won’t go. I’ve told her over and again to be off and better herself, but she won’t go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet’s room just as that’s her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn’t like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with. It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney’s I was telling you of. The News and Courier had yards of obituary notice and verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There’s all her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open one of the drawers in that chest.”

Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air became filled with the scent of lavender.

“There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if she’d 138 died of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did—well, somehow, it didn’t seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the drawing-room, and she said, one night, 

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