“Oh, yes, they seem like individuals to me.”

Mrs. Denver wheezed on—there was always a sound of corsets in her voice—“But Neil, even if you can tell ‘em apart, you don’t like that old fussbudget of a headwaiter, do you?”

“Yes, I do. I think he’s a fine old gentleman.”

“Gentleman? My, what a funny word to use about a darky!”

After the festal dinner, they drove to the Denver abode, just back of Neil’s house, and in came a spate of neighbors: Don and Rose Pennloss, and Cedric Staubermeyer, the much-traveled dealer in paints, wallpaper, linoleum and other objects of art, with wife. There was pleasant but intellectual conversation, and Neil was able to compare the prosperous white man’s range of cultural interests with the primitive outlook of the Negroes to whom he had listened, three evenings before, at the house of a colored janitor:

“I think it’s getting quite a bit warmer.”

“Yes, but June was awfully cold.”

“Oh, did you think so? I didn’t think it was colder than usual. Not especially, I mean.”

“Wasn’t it? Well, I felt like it was colder.”

Flashes like that, thrown off without effort.

But Mrs. Cedric Staubermeyer was more studied and, it might be said, educational:

“My, my, doesn’t seem like ten years ago, just seems like yesterday we were in Rome. We saw the Eternal City through and through, and the ruins, very ancient, and the Vatican and the airfield, and the lady at the English teashop, she was English, and she said my! we seemed like old inhabitants to her, and of course we had a great advantage, not staying at a hotel but at a pension where we met the native Italians, we met several, and they explained everything to us, and such an interesting Frenchman, my! he spoke the most beautiful English, just like Cedric’s and mine, and imagine! he told us he had a cousin living right here in Grand Republic!”

But Mr. Staubermeyer put in a sour note:

“We never looked his cousin up when we got back here, because I suspect this French guy was a Jew, and you know what I think of Jews, and so would you, if you had to do business with them, and so I said to my wife, ‘Oh, the hell with him! I can stand foreigners in foreign parts,’ I said, ‘and I like the natives all right, except for the way they live and do business, but let’s just keep ‘em abroad, where they belong.’”

* * * * *

Their range of interests was by no means limited to travel. They went thoroughly into the prospects for pheasant-hunting this coming fall, the crookedness of their congressman—for whom, however, they would continue to vote, lest a Farmer-Labor-Democrat get in, and the facts that Mr. Jones was buying the house of Mr. Brown and Mr. Brown was drinking too much. They skillfully compared the prices for women’s stockings in Tarr’s Emporium, the Beaux Arts, and the shops in Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul, until Mrs. Denver cried, “My gracious, we’ve been chatting away so that I never realized it was so late, but you don’t mean to say that you’re going home, Neil?”