“Nothing could be more important, because she’ll be a little girl only once, you know.”

They had gone so far toward the assemblage of this Norman dungeon as to have planned to buy a new gas-stove.

The war with Japan had ended, and while Vestal was properly glad that their friends would be coming home from the South Pacific, she confessed to an equal delight that now the manufacturers would turn from arms to unimaginable domestic treasures: plastic dressing-tables and crystal coffee-pots and automatic dish-washers. She was already thinking of the wardrobe, in fabrics still uninvented, which she would prepare for Biddy when she went to Bryn Mawr, a dozen years from now.

At breakfast she suggested to Neil, “I’ll come downtown today, and you buy me a lunch and we’ll look at the gas-stove that I’ve set my girlish heart on. It’s a jewel of a stove, a rose, an eagle, a Bedlington of a stove, a stone, a leaf, a door, and I love it more than I do virtue—at least, it’s more practical.”

When he saw it, the stove did possess most of the splendors that Vestal had advertised, and she gloated, “That’ll make even our present dump of a kitchen look like the manorhouse of our destiny.”

He sighed, “But you still do like our house, don’t you?”

“Oh, Neil, no matter how I rave about future palaces, I love our little shack violently—our own place, that not even a crazy, wild-haired Democrat government can take away from us. Comes the depression, we’ll retire there and grow onions in the bathrooms and be happy as grigs—how happy is an average-size grig, do you suppose? Oh.” She nodded toward the arm-folded and wearily back-tilted salesman. “I think you can jew him down five dollars on the price. Try it.”

–-I wonder if a Jew likes that phrase, “jew him down,” any better than my people like “sweating like a nigger”? Oh, quit it! You’re the possessor of a beautiful wife, a beautiful gas-stove, and you were going to forget all this race-hysteria.

It was on that same afternoon that Ash Davis came to sit by his desk and say formally, lest anyone be listening, “Mr. Kingsblood, may I disturb you for a minute?”

“Nobody around, Ash.”

“Neil, again I’m here begging. Bad news. Several colored returned soldiers arrested in South Carolina for a murder they couldn’t have committed. Sophie and I are raising a fund for lawyers. I want all the money you can spare. And I warn you that if you’re so simple as to give me one cent, it will be only the beginning of the leech’s daughters yelling, ‘Give, give!’”

Neil decided what he could afford, and made out a check for slightly more than that. He was longing for the cool, humorous, devastating talk of Ash and Clem and Sophie.

“When can I sit in with all of you again?” he urged.