Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/187

 people who understood business and what it took to succeed.

They had a daughter whom I had known as a child back in the home town M—plis, where she had cousins that she used to visit. She had by this time grown into a woman of five and twenty. Her name was Daisy Hinshaw. Now Miss Hinshaw was not very good-looking but had spent years in school and in many ways was unlike the average colored girl. She was attentive and did not have her mind full of cheap, showy ideals. I had written to her at times from South Dakota and she had answered with many inviting letters. Therefore, when I wrote her from New York that I intended paying her a visit, she answered in a very inviting letter, but boldly told me not to forget to bring her a nice present, that she would like a large purse. I did not like such boldness. I should have preferred a little more modesty, but I found the purse, however, a large seal one in a Fifth Avenue shop, for six dollars, which Miss Hinshaw displayed with much show when I came to town.

The town had a colored population of about one thousand and the many girls who led in the local society looked enviously upon Miss Hinshaw's catch—and the large seal purse—and I became the "Man of the Hour" in C—dale.

The only marriageable man in the town who did not gamble, get drunk and carouse in a way that made him ineligible to decent society, was the professor of the colored school. He was a college graduate and received sixty dollars a month. He had been spoiled by too much attention, however, and was not an agreeable person.