From one until half-past, then, was Mrs. Brady’s recess. She had been looking forward to it all the evening long. When it began--when the opening chords of the tango music sounded stirringly from the room outside--Mrs. Brady brightened. With a right good will she sped the parting guests. Alone, she unlocked her cupboard and took out her magazine--the magazine she had bought three hours before. Heaving a great breath of relief and satisfaction, she plumped herself on the couch and fingered the pages. Immediately she was absorbed, her eyes drinking up printed lines, her lips moving soundlessly. The magazine was Mrs. Brady’s favourite. Its stories were true stories, taken from life (so the editor said); and to Mrs. Brady they were live, vivid threads in the dull, drab pattern of her night. SINGING WOMAN BY ADA JACK CARVER From _Harper’s_ Little by little the Joyous Coast was changing. The old rutted dirt road that fringed the Cane had been abandoned. The highways cut through the swamps and marshy lands and fields full of corn and refused to follow the whim of the river. It seemed to old Henriette relentless and terrible. It even ploughed its way through people’s dooryards, rooting up ancient landmarks: oaks and chinas and gnarled crêpe myrtles, their branches bowed to the earth with bloom--trees under which Henriette in her day had been courted and won. Isle Brevelle, where the French mulattoes live, is not lonely and strange as is an island lost in the sea. With the river curving about it, it is like a maid in the arms of a lover who woos her forever: “_Lie still, Adored One. Are my arms not around you? Do you not feel the beat of my heart? Behold the gifts I have brought, the fruit and the flowers I lay at your feet. You are round and shining like the sun, more beautiful than the day_----” The young people on Isle Brevelle liked the changing order, the feeling of unrest and impatience. Now, in the long summer evenings they could get in cars and go to town, to see the sights; or take in the coloured picture show up on the hill. “_Mais non_, we don’t speak to them niggers,” they assured old Henriette. “We don’t have nothing to do with them black folks.”