"I thank you--good-bye," she said briefly at the door, and was gone.
Bles did not know whether to feel relieved or provoked, or disappointed,
and by way of compromise felt something of all three.
The next morning he received notice of his appointment to a clerkship in
the Treasury Department, at a salary of nine hundred dollars. The sum
seemed fabulous and he was in the seventh heaven. For many days the
consciousness of wealth, the new duties, the street scenes, and the city
life kept him more than busy. He planned to study, and arranged with a
professor at Howard University to guide him. He bought an armful of
books and a desk, and plunged desperately to work.
Gradually as he became used to the office routine, and in the hours when
he was weary of study, he began to find time hanging a little heavily on
his hands; indeed--although he would not acknowledge it--he was getting
lonesome, homesick, amid the myriad men of a busy city. He argued to
himself that this was absurd, and yet he knew that he was longing for
human companionship. When he looked about him for fellowship he found
himself in a strange dilemma: those black folk in whom he recognized the
old sweet-tempered Negro traits, had also looser, uglier manners than he
was accustomed to, from which he shrank. The upper classes of Negroes,
on the other hand, he still observed from afar; they were strangers not
only in acquaintance but because of a curious coldness and aloofness
that made them cease to seem his own kind; they seemed almost at times
like black white people--strangers in way and thought.
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