I liked to look at Betty’s collection of tortoise-shell round combs, her barrettes and her grosgrain hair-ribbons, her party dresses with artificial roses at the shoulder, her splendidly equipped writing desk with lavender and pink note paper, a brand new set of Prang’s non-poisonous water-colors, red sealing wax, a gold pen and pencil engraved with her name, and a soft, white leather-bound New Testament with many colored place ribbons given her, it said on the flyleaf, by her loving mother two years before when she had been an angel in a Sunday School pageant. The inscription impressed me: “From your loving mother, Mrs. Robert Killigrew Brunson.”

Occasionally, when I had washed the dish towels and had swept the kitchen floor, Mrs. Brunson would call out to her daughter, “Go on and make the popcorn if you want to, angel face.” I would stay on then sometimes until ten o’clock if the Brunsons, absorbed in magazines, forgot to send Betty to bed, and as we ate the buttery popcorn (made in an electric drum with a wooden handle which one turned round and round) she might digress from her own affairs to talk about people and things that I knew.

Once she said, “I don’t know how you stand living next to those awful Kadish simps, chum. Honestly, they’re lousy. Cranberry makes me sick to the stomach to look at him. My mother wouldn’t let me go with them for anything. Do you want to know something? They’re Jews.”

I was ashamed of my passion for Nathan and I said in defense, but meekly, “My father was a Catholic.”

“Oh, that’s different,” she soothed me. “Daddy says you don’t have to be a Catholic just because your daddy is. I mean, that’s silly. I mean, well, after all, I’m not a Mason, am I, just because Daddy is?”

Despite her cordiality, there was a note of reserve in her voice as if my heritage had been discussed and rationalized and not merely accepted. “Anyhow,” she went on, “Daddy has some good friends that are Catholics, but he won’t have anything to do with a Jew.”

A little later, on an evening when the Brunsons were entertaining, I learned how I was regarded in the household. Someone remarked on my extreme youth, and Mrs. Brunson replied, “But she’s a jewel even so. You see, she was practically born in the pantry of the Hotel here and was trained before I got her.” Dr. Brunson, a rash democrat, said, “She’s good company for Betty, too.” But his wife snapped irritably, “That’s beside the point, Bob.”