Martha Davis was to drive Sophie home. Ash suggested, “I’ll walk over and put Mr. Kingsblood on a bus…. Just as well not to wander around here alone, after one in the morning. Some bad actors—not all colored. I’ll promise to keep off the race-talk, though there is no complete cure for it. The other day, in the bathroom, I read a label ‘facial tissues’ as ‘racial issues.’”

To Mary Woolcape, Neil said privately, “This evening has been exciting but I still don’t know that I can tell even our friends here that I am a Negro.”

“I’m not even sure you ought to, not sure at all. Why risk the humiliations we’ve been talking about tonight?”

There were late-burning lights behind dark curtains along Mayo Street, and from the rooms over a store came a high cackle of laughter. The alleys were filled with shadows—they may have been men lurking and they may have been barrels, but in neither case did Neil like them. Ash had nothing to say, and Neil saw how attentively he watched every sliding alley cat, every dusky loafer squatted on his heels on a grating.

Neil insisted on their walking from the bus stop up to Canoe Heights, and Ash’s house.

It was a small house and low-roofed, but Neil saw from its great window, which made one whole corner a cage of glass, that this was what was called a “modern house,” in revolt from all the Cape Cod and Tudor of Sylvan Park. He had heard Mr. Prutt condemn such structures as anarchistic, but he had never been inside one.

Ash murmured, “You must come in for a drink,” and Neil entered a room that repelled him and fascinated him by its conscious bareness, its freedom from all silver-boxery. It had two centers: the huge corner window, through which he could see a net of pale lights far down below them in the Five Points, and a severe fireplace, of polished stone, without a mantel. The few chairs, covered with rough-woven material, were of unconventional shapes, more attentive to the human form than to Chippendale; and on the wall, which was lined with something that seemed at once to be wallpaper and metal, there was just one picture, an orgy of reeling triangles. On the small piano was a lump of awkward black sculpture.

“Well—so this is a Modern House,” Neil marveled, as Ash mixed a highball at a competent closet-bar.

“So they call it.”

“Who was your architect?”

“Me, so far as there was one. This was a kind of shed, and Martha and I made it over. But you know, I think this house is the symbol of my shame. I’m afraid I really did it to spite Lucian Firelock, and keeping up with the highbrows is worse than keeping up with the Joneses. You know Firelock?”

“Advertising manager at Wargate’s—Southern guy? Yes, a little.”