Quicksand and Passing

QUICKSAND

AND

PASSING

AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS SERIES

Joanne Dobson, Judith Fetterley, and Elaine Showalter, series editors

ALTERNATIVE ALCOTT

Louisa May Alcott

Elaine Showalter, editor

MOODS

Louisa May Alcott

Sarah Elbert, editor

STORIES FROM THE COUNTRY OF LOST BORDERS

Mary Austin

Marjorie Pryse, editor

CLOVERNOOK SKETCHES AND OTHER STORIES

Alice Cary

Judith Fetterley, editor

HOBOMOK AND OTHER WRITINGS ON INDIANS

Lydia Maria Child

Carolyn L. Karcher, editor

HOW CELIA CHANGED HER MIND AND SELECTED STORIES

Rose Terry Cooke

Elizabeth Ammons, editor

THE LAMPLIGHTER

Maria Susanna Cummins

Nina Baym, editor

RUTH HALL AND OTHER WRITINGS

Fanny Fern

Joyce Warren, editor

THE ESSENTIAL

MARGARET FULLER

Jeffrey Steele, editor

GAIL HAMILTON: SELECTED WRITINGS

Susan Coultrap-McQuin, editor

A NEW HOME, WHO’LL FOLLOW?

Caroline M. Kirkland

Sandra A. Zagarell, editor

QUICKSAND AND PASSING

Nella Larsen

Deborah E. McDowell, editor

HOPE LESLIE

Catharine Maria Sedgwick

Mary Kelley, editor

THE HIDDEN HAND

E.D.E.N. Southworth

Joanne Dobson, editor

THE AMBER GODS AND OTHER STORIES

Harriet Prescott Spofford

Alfred Bendixen, editor

OLDTOWN FOLKS

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Dorothy Berkson, editor

WOMEN ARTISTS, WOMEN EXILES: MISS GRIEF AND OTHER STORIES

Constance Fenimore Woolson

Joan Myers Weimer, editor

AMERICAN WOMEN POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: AN ANTHOLOGY

Cheryl Walker, editor

QUICKSAND

AND

PASSING

NELLA LARSEN

Edited and with an Introduction by

DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

First published in cloth and paperback

in the United States of America

by Rutgers University Press, 1986

First published in the United Kingdom in paperback

by Serpent’s Tail, 1988

Twenty-fifth paperback printing, 2020

Copyright © 1986 by Rutgers, The State University

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Larsen, Nella.

Quicksand and Passing.

(American women writers series)

Bibliography: p.

I. McDowell, Deborah E., 1951–    .    II. Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1986.    III. Title: Quicksand.    IV. Passing.    V. Series.

PS3523.A7225A6    1986            813′.52                86-1963

ISBN 0-8135-1169-0

ISBN 0-8135-1170-4 (pbk.)

978-1-9788-3269-5 (epub)

978-0-8135-5809-7 (pdf)

978-1-9788-3270-1 (mobi)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Notes to Introduction

Selected Bibliography

A Note on the Texts

Quicksand

Passing

Explanatory Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Nellie McKay and Marilyn Richardson for their helpful questions, suggestions, and encouragement, and Elaine Showalter, especially, for the incisive editorial advice without which this essay would be greatly diminished.

INTRODUCTION

Until the early 1970s when previously lost work by women writers began to be recovered and reprinted, Nella Larsen was one of several women writers of the Harlem Renaissance relegated to the back pages of that movement’s literary history, a curious fate since her career had such an auspicious beginning. Touted as a promising writer by blacks and whites alike, Larsen was encouraged by some of the most influential names on the 1920s arts scene. Walter White, onetime director of the NAACP, read drafts of Quicksand and urged Larsen along to its completion. Carl Van Vechten, popularly credited with promoting many Harlem Renaissance writers, introduced the novel to his publisher, Knopf. These efforts paid off. Larsen won second prize in literature in 1928 for Quicksand from the Harmon Foundation which awarded outstanding achievement by Negroes. Quicksand was also well received by the critics. In his review of the novel W. E. B. DuBois, for example, praised it as the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt.¹ Passing was equally well received. One reviewer gave the novel high marks for capturing, as did no other novel of the genre, the psychology of racial passing with consummate art.² Due largely to the success of these first two novels, Larsen won a Guggenheim in 1930—the first black female creative writer to be so honored—to do research on a third novel in Spain and France. That novel was never published.

After the publication of Passing, Larsen published her last piece, a story entitled Sanctuary. The subject of much controversy, many speculate that the scandal it created helped to send Larsen into obscurity. Following the publication of the story in 1930 Larsen was accused of plagiarism. One reader wrote to the editor of the magazine about the striking resemblance of Larsen’s story to one by Sheila Kaye-Smith, entitled, Mrs. Adis, published in the January 1922 issue of Century magazine. The editor of The Forum conducted an investigation and was finally convinced that the resemblance between the stories was an extraordinary coincidence. In compliance with the editor’s request, Larsen wrote a detailed explanation of the way in which she came by the germ for her story, trying to vindicate herself. Despite her editor’s support, Larsen never recovered from the shock of the charge.³ She disappeared from the literary scene and returned to nursing at Bethel Hospital in Brooklyn where she remained until her retirement. She died in Brooklyn in 1964, practically in obscurity.

Why a career with such auspicious beginnings had such an inauspicious ending has continued to perplex students of the Harlem Renaissance. Many search for answers in the scattered fragments of Larsen’s biography, which reveal a delicate and unstable person. Though there is precious little information about Larsen, some pieces of her life’s puzzle are fairly widely known.⁴ Born in Chicago in 1891, she was the daughter of a Danish mother and a black West Indian father who died when Larsen was a young girl. Larsen’s mother remarried, this time to a white man who treated his stepdaughter with some disfavor. Never feeling connected to this newly configured family, Larsen searched vainly for the sense of belonging it could not provide. Fickle and unsettled, Larsen roamed from place to place, searching for some undefined and undefinable something. She studied science for a year at Fisk University in Tennessee, during her rocky marriage to physicist Elmer S. Imes, a professor there. She left Fisk to travel to Denmark where she audited classes at the University of Copenhagen. Returning to the states, she studied nursing at Lincoln Hospital Training School for Nurses in New York, graduating in 1915.

For a brief time after her nurse’s training, she was superintendent of nurses at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Unable to tolerate its stifling atmosphere, she left after only a year and returned to New York. There she worked as a nurse, between 1916 and 1918 at the hospital where she was trained; and, between 1918 and 1921, for New York City’s Department of Health. Dissatisfied with this career, she began work in 1921 at the children’s division of the New York Public Library, enrolling in its training program. During her employment as a librarian, she began to write.

Since the beginning of Larsen’s career, critics have praised her as a gifted writer,⁵ commending her skill at the craft of fiction—most notably, successful characterization, narrative unity, and economy. However, they have consistently criticized the endings of her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), which reveal her difficulty with rounding off stories convincingly. Larsen shared this problem of unconvincing endings with her black female contemporaries, Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston. Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924), for example, ends with the heroine’s renunciation of her successful stage career to marry, accepting as a matter of course that her husband was the arbiter of her own and her child’s destiny.⁶ Or there is the example of Missy May in Zora Neale Hurston’s story, The Gilded Six Bits (1933), who proudly boasts to her husband, if you burn me, you won’t get a thing but wife ashes. At the story’s end, weak from bearing her husband a lil boy chile, she crawls to pick up the silver dollars that he is throwing through the door.⁷ Or, finally, there is the case of Arvay Henson in Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), who retreats from the brink of independence and self-realization and returns to her verbally abusive husband, resolved that he was her man and her care and [h]er job was mothering. What more could any woman want and need? … Yes, she was serving and meant to serve. She made the sun welcome to come on in, then snuggled down again beside her husband.⁸

These unearned and unsettling endings sacrifice strong and emerging independent female identities to the most acceptable demands of literary and social history. But these endings seem far less unsettling when compared to those of Quicksand and Passing. Though both novels feature daring and unconventional heroines, in the end, they sacrifice these heroines to the most conventional fates of narrative history: marriage and death, respectively. In Quicksand, the cultured and refined Helga Crane marries a rural southern preacher and follows him to his backwoods church to uplift his parishioners. At the end of the novel, she is in a state of emotional and physical collapse from having too many children. In Passing, the defiant and adventurous Clare, who flouts all the social rules of the black bourgeoisie, falls to her death under melodramatic and ambiguous circumstances.

Critics of Larsen have been rightly perplexed by these abrupt and contradictory endings. But if examined through the prism of black female sexuality, not only do they make more sense, they also illuminate the peculiar pressures on Larsen as a woman writer during the male-dominated Harlem Renaissance. They show her grappling with the conflicting demands of her racial and sexual identities and the contradictions of a black and feminine aesthetic. Moreover, while these endings appear to be concessions to the dominant ideology of romance—marriage and motherhood—viewed from a feminist perspective, they become much more radical and original efforts to acknowledge a female sexual experience, most often repressed in both literary and social realms.

I

Since the very beginning of their history running over roughly 130 years, black women novelists have treated sexuality with caution and reticence, a pattern clearly linked to the network of social and literary myths perpetuated throughout history about black women’s libidinousness. It is well known that during slavery the white slave master constructed an image of black female sexuality which shifted responsibility for his own sexual passions onto his female slaves. They, not he, had wanton, insatiable desires that he was powerless to resist. The image did not end with emancipation. So persistent was it that black club women devoted part of their first national conference in July 1895 to addressing it.⁹ Though myths about black women’s lasciviousness were not new to the era, a letter from one J. W. Jacks, a white male editor of a Missouri newspaper, made them a matter of urgent concern to black club women. Forwarded to Josephine S. Pierre Ruffin, editor of The Woman’s Era,¹⁰ the letter attacked black women’s virtue, supplying evidence from other black women. According to Jacks, when a certain negro woman was asked to identify a newcomer to the community, she responded, the negroes will have nothing to do with ‘dat nigger,’ she won’t let any man, except her husband sleep with her, and we don’t’sociate with her.¹¹ Mrs. Ruffin circulated the letter widely to prominent black women and to heads of other women’s clubs around the country, calling for a conference to discuss this and other social concerns of black women.

Given this context, it is not surprising that a pattern of reticence about black female sexuality dominated novels by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They responded to the myth of the black woman’s sexual licentiousness by insisting fiercely on her chastity. Fighting to overcome their heritage of rape and concubinage, and following the movement by black club women of the era, they imitated the purity, the sexual morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie. In such works as Emma Dunham Kelley’s Megda (1891), Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900),¹² black heroines struggle to defend and preserve the priceless gem of virginity.

Even in Larsen’s day, the Freudian 1920s, the Jazz Age of sexual abandon and free love—when female sexuality, in general, was acknowledged and commercialized in the advertising, beauty, and fashion industries—black women’s novels preserve their reticence about sexuality. Larsen and Jessie Fauset, among the most prolific novelists of the decade, lacked the daring of their contemporaries, the black female blues singers such as Bessie, Mamie, and Clara Smith (all unrelated), Gertrude Ma Rainey, and Victoria Spivey. These women sang openly and seductively about sex and celebrated the female body and female desire as seen, for example, in a stanza from Ma Rainey’s, It’s Tight like That: See that spider crawling up the wall … going to get his ashes hauled. / Oh it’s tight like that. Or Clara Smith’s Whip It to a Jelly: There’s a new game, that can’t be beat / You move most everything ‘cept your feet / Called whip it to a jelly, stir it in a bowl / You just whip it to a jelly, if you like good jelly roll.¹³

Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen could only hint at the idea of black women as sexual subjects behind the safe and protective covers of traditional narrative subjects and conventions. Though their heroines are not the paragons of chastity that their nineteenth-century predecessors created, we cannot imagine them singing a Bessie Smith lyric such as I’m wild about that thing or You’ve got to get it, bring it, and put it right here. Rather, they strain to honor the same ethics of sexual conduct called for by a respondent to a 1920s symposium titled Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs. Conducted by some of the same leading Negro club women who had organized around Jacks’ libelous attack on black women’s virtue, the symposium ran for several issues in The Messenger, one of the black little magazines of the period. The writer lamented what she called the speed and disgust of the Jazz Age which created women less discreet and less cautious than [their] sisters in years gone by. These new women, she continued, were rebelling against the laws of God and man. Thus, she concluded that the greatest need of Negro womanhood was to return to the timidity and modesty peculiar to pure womanhood of yesterday.¹⁴

The blues lyrics and the club women’s symposium capture, respectively, the dialectic of desire and fear, pleasure and danger that defines women’s sexual experiences in male-dominated societies. As Carole Vance maintains, Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.¹⁵ For women, and especially for black women, sexual pleasure leads to the dangers of domination in marriage, repeated pregnancy, or exploitation and loss of status.

Both Quicksand and Passing wrestle simultaneously with this dialectic between pleasure and danger. In their reticence about sexuality, they look back to their nineteenth-century predecessors, but in their simultaneous flirtation with female sexual desire, they are solidly grounded in the liberation of the 1920s. Their ideological ambivalences are rooted in the artistic politics of the Harlem Renaissance, regarding the representation of black sexuality, especially black female sexuality.

II

The issue of representing black sexuality was highly controversial during the movement. As many have argued, Carl Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven (1926) set the pattern that would dominate the literary treatment of black sexuality in the decade. Amritjit Singh suggests, for example, that the novel had a crippling effect on the self-expression of many black writers by either making it easier to gain success riding the bandwagon of primitivism, or by making it difficult to publish novels that did not fit the profile of the commercial success formula adopted by most publishers for black writers.¹⁶

Such novels as Claude McKay’s infamous Home to Harlem (1928) and Arna Bontemps’s God Sends Sunday (1931) are said to follow the Van Vechten script. In them black women are mainly primitive exotic sex objects, many of them prostitutes, an image which Nathan Huggins correctly identifies as a male fantasy. It is difficult, he adds rightly, to draw sympathetic females whose whole existence is their bodies and instinct. Besides, he concludes, Perhaps women, whose freedom has natural limitations—they have babies—are essentially conservative.¹⁷ Helga Crane’s outcome poignantly demonstrates this connection between sexuality and reproduction.

There were those—Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, W. E. B. DuBois, among them—who found the primitive/exotic stereotype associated with Van Vechten limited, at best. DuBois voiced his objections vehemently on the pages of the Crisis, virtually waging a one man, morality-minded campaign against the nastiness he saw embodied in novels that seemed to follow the Van Vechten lead. DuBois was committed to the struggle of racial uplift and social equality, a struggle best waged, in his opinion, by the talented tenth, the elite group of black intellectuals and artists. In that struggle, art had a vital, and necessarily propagandistic role to play.¹⁸

DuBois reviewed Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Larsen’s Quicksand together for the Crisis, praising Larsen’s novel as a fine, thoughtful and courageous piece of work, while criticizing McKay’s as so nauseating in its emphasis on drunkenness, fighting, and sexual promiscuity that it made him feel … like taking a bath.¹⁹

In this context, Larsen was indeed caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. On the one side, Carl Van Vechten, roundly excoriated along with his followers by many members of the black middle-class intelligentsia, was her friend. He was responsible for introducing Quicksand to Knopf, and perhaps Larsen showed her gratitude by dedicating Passing to him and his wife Fania Marinoff. On the other side, Larsen was a member of the black intelligentsia whose attitudes about art Van Vechten had criticized in Nigger Heaven, using Russett Durwood as mouth-piece. Durwood advises Byron Kasson, the would-be black writer, to abandon the old cliches and formulas and write about what he knows—black life in the raw. Harlem is overrun with fresh, unused material, he tells Kasson. Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has touched the outskirts of cabaret life; nobody has gone into the curious subject of the diverse tribes of the region. He concludes with the prediction that if the young Negro intellectuals don’t get busy, a new crop of Nordics is going to spring up … and … exploit this material before the Negro gets around to it.²⁰ Van Vechten was one such Nordic.

In her criticism of such black bourgeois intellectuals as Robert Anderson and James Vayle in Quicksand, Larsen would seem to share some of Van Vechten’s opinions of that class. But as much as she could poke fun at their devotion to racial uplift, she belonged, blood and breath, to that class, and must have found it extremely difficult to cut her ties with it.

To be writing about black female sexuality within this conflicted context, then, posed peculiar problems for Larsen. The questions confronting her might well be formulated: How to write about black female sexuality in a literary era that often sensationalized it and pandered to the stereotype of the primitive exotic? How to give a black female character the right to healthy sexual expression and pleasure without offending the proprieties established by the spokespersons of the black middle class? The answers to these questions for Larsen lay in attempting to hold these two virtually contradictory impulses in the same novel. We might say that Larsen wanted to tell the story of the black woman with sexual desires, but was constrained by a competing desire to establish black women as respectable in black middle-class terms. The latter desire committed her to exploring black female sexuality obliquely and, inevitably, to permitting it only within the context of marriage, despite the strangling effects of that choice both on her characters and on her narratives.

III

Ann had perceived that the decorous surface of her new husband’s mind regarded Helga Crane with … intellectual and aesthetic appreciation … but that underneath that well-managed section, in a more lawless place … was another, a vagrant primitive groping toward something shocking and frightening to the cold asceticism of his reason … that nameless… shameful impulse … [Emphasis added]

—Quicksand

The contradictory impulses of Larsen’s novels are clear in the psychic divisions of her characters, divisions especially apparent in Helga Crane of Quicksand.²¹ Most critics locate the origins of that dualism in Helga’s mixed racial heritage.²² The classic tragic mulatto, alienated from both races, she is defeated by her struggle to reconcile the psychic confusion that this mixed heritage creates.

The argument that Helga’s is a story of the tragic mulatto is clearly supported by the novel’s epigraph from Langston Hughes’s poem Cross, which treats the problem of racial dualism as seen in the last two lines: I wonder where I’m gonna die, / Being white nor black? But the epigraph is suited only partially to Quicksand. It touches the issue of female sexuality which dominates the novel only indirectly. In other words, in focusing on the problems of the tragic mulatto, readers miss the more urgent problem of female sexual identity which Larsen tried to explore.

Helga is divided psychically between a desire for sexual fulfillment and a longing for social respectability. The pressures of the divisions intensify to the point that she wonders Why [she] couldn’t … have two lives? The novel works out this tension between sexual expression and repression, in both thematic impulse and narrative strategy. In other words, Larsen’s narrative strategies mirror her heroine’s dilemma. Helga’s psychic struggle seems the same war fought by Nella Larsen between narrative expression and repression of female sexuality as literary subject. The novel, like its protagonist, would seem to want two lives as well: as female sexual confession and novel of racial uplift.

Helga’s sexual repression is understandable, given her illegitimate origins and her proper upbringing. The Naxos academic community, the setting in which the novel opens, is rigidly stratified, emphasizing ancestry and connections, above all. More than a mythical allusion, Naxos is an anagram of Saxon, suggesting the school’s worship of everything Anglo-Saxon.²³

At Naxos, attitudes about the sexual conduct of a single woman are rigidly conservative and upheld by the humorless and prim Miss MacGooden [emphasis added], the dormitory matron. [Priding] herself on being a ‘lady’ from one of the best families in the South, she explains her reasons for never marrying: There were things in the matrimonial state … entirely too repulsive for a lady of delicate and sensitive nature to submit to. Though others strain to follow Miss MacGooden’s example, becoming ladies-in-making, Helga finds it altogether negative.

Larsen captures these conflicts between Helga and Naxos through the use of clothing as iconography. The dull sobriety of Naxos considers bright colors … vulgar, requiring black, gray, brown, and navy blue. In sharp conflict with this dress code, Helga’s elaborate clothes are in dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds in soft, luxurious woolens or heavy, clinging silks mirroring her passionate intensity and sexuality.²⁴

Leaving this repressive environment, Helga goes, appropriately, to Harlem, which in Harlem Renaissance mythology is the site of sexual freedom and abandon, but even here, her dress is conspicuous and outlandish. At a dinner party, for example, Helga decides to wear a cobwebby black net [dress] touched with orange, even though she is aware that it is too décolleté. The cut and color of the dress suggest warmth, passion, but the lure of sexuality is entrapped. Here, unlike in Naxos, her conflicts are not with a repressive environment, but rather with herself.

Helga’s internal conflicts find their most complete expression in the Harlem cabaret scene where she observes an assortment of semibarbaric, exotic people, the essence of bodily motion, all moving to the syncopated beat of jungle tom-toms. Her impulses of attraction/repulsion, pleasure/danger reach a near deadlock. Simultaneously excited and arrested by the music, when suddenly [it] died, she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle but that she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature.

Throughout the novel, Helga retreats from these sexual feelings. Wanting to avoid them, she leaves Harlem, the mecca of the exotic, the primitive, and escapes to Copenhagen. The split between black and Scandinavian is an extreme duality of hot/cold, dark/light, south/north, resonating with and reflecting the divisions in Helga. Copenhagen does not relieve Helga’s dilemma, because, ironically, the Danes transform and reduce her to a veritable savage, a decoration, a curiousity, a stunt at which people came and gazed.

Their transformation of Helga into a sexual object continues the familiar pattern in the novel in which Helga is alternately defined by others (primarily men), as a lady or a Jezebel. Neither designation captures her as a sexual subject, but simply as an object. She is not allowed to choose the terms and the objects of sexual desire. She leaves Naxos because Dr. Anderson calls her a lady with dignity and breeding. While looking for work in Chicago, men—white and black alike—mistake her for a prostitute.²⁵ Finally, when Helga wanders into the church wearing a clinging red dress, the church women call her a scarlet ‘oman, a pore los’ Jezebel.

Axel Olsen, the Danish artist, identifies Helga’s contradictions when she refuses his insulting sexual proposition, adding, in my country the men of my race, at least, don’t make such suggestions to decent girls. Helga uses race here as a mask for her sexual repressions. She implies, simultaneously, an awareness of her legacy of rape and concubinage at the hands of white men, a legacy which compels her to decline Olsen’s sexual proposition and his marriage proposal.

Though Olsen’s remarks are insulting, they act as a catalyst for Helga’s resolution to reconcile the suspensive conflict[s] of her life and to release her pent-up desires for sexual freedom. Significantly, up to and through Copenhagen, Helga has been pursued, while after Copenhagen, she becomes the pursuer. It is appropriate that the field of her pursuits is Harlem where sexual freedom and unrestraint ostensibly abound. But ironically, Helga turns for release to Dr. Anderson, who has already designated Helga a lady, and therefore a nonsexual being. Further, Anderson himself is the very embodiment of sexual conflict and repression. He makes ascetic protest[s] against the sensuous, the physical, though underneath his decorous surface lurked a more lawless place, a nameless and shameful place that must be repressed. Though he kisses Helga passionately at a party, he is loathe to follow through on the overture. His apology to her leaves Helga disconcerted and haunted by voluptuous visions. Desire … burned in her flesh in uncontrollable violence.

The sexual desires, pent-up throughout the novel, finally explode in Helga’s primitive, passionate religious conversion, the description of which unambiguously simulates sexual excitement and orgasmic release:

Little by little the performance took on an almost Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, before her, beside her, frenzied women gesticulated, screamed, wept …

And as Helga watched and listened gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in own heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about …. [She grasped at the railing, and with no previous intention began to yell like one insane, drowning every other clamor, while torrents of tears streamed down her face …. Those who succeeded in getting near to her leaned forward to encourage the unfortunate sister, dropping hot tears and beads of sweat upon her bare arms and neck.

The thing became real. A miraculous calm came upon her. Life seemed to expand, and to become very easy. Helga Crane felt within her a supreme aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness, a happiness unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known. About her the tumult and the shouting continued, but in a lesser degree. Some of the more exuberant worshipers had fainted into inert masses, the voices of others were almost spent. Gradually the room grew quiet and almost solemn, and to the kneeling