Quicksand
But when mental doors were deliberately shut on those skeletons that stalked lively and in full health through the consciousness of every person of Negro ancestry in America—conspicuous black, obvious brown, or indistinguishable white—life was intensely amusing, interesting, absorbing, and enjoyable; singularly lacking in that tone of anxiety which the insecurities of existence seemed to ferment in other peoples.
Yet Helga herself had an acute feeling of insecurity, for which she could not account. Sometimes it amounted to fright almost. “I must,” she would say then, “get back to Copenhagen.” But the resolution gave her not much pleasure. And for this she now blamed Axel Olsen. It was, she insisted, he who had driven her back, made her unhappy in Denmark. Though she knew well that it wasn‘t. Misgivings, too, rose in her. Why hadn‘t she married him? Anne was married—she would not say
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