Neil had to knock together some explanation of his intrusion. When he came up with Winthrop, he said to Mrs. Brewster, “Will you let me tell you something you already know? Win has most unusual talent. I’m proud to know him. And he represents something I’m trying to find out, on behalf of both the bank and myself: the progress of all the so-called minorities here—the Finns and Poles and Negroes and, uh, the Lithuanians and–-” His geography was running out. “And everybody! I hope you’ll accept me as a student.”

Evan Brewster had accepted him before he was born. Corinne Brewster began to look as if she might accept him after he was grown up.

“I wish you’d let me do something: get hold of Dr. Ash Davis and Mrs. Davis and maybe Miss Sophie Concord, and let me take you all to dinner at this Bar-B-Q place I’ve noticed. I’m afraid it’s a little impertinent to ask you so late, but if you could manage it–-”

They could but encourage so earnest a disciple.

On their way to the Bar-B-Q, Winthrop and Thankful, the raceless and young, each clung to an arm of their burly new banker friend, and interrupted each other in stories about their collie pup, Algernon C. Swinburne.

–-But what would happen if we met Rod Aldwick on the way?

The Bar-B-Q was almost filled with a long lunch-counter, but there were tables, like card-tables, with twisted-wire chairs. The napkins were of paper. The bill of fare featured spare-ribs, ham, hamburg steak, and tenderloin—which was out; and the waitresses were young women with good will, gum, and no training. It was like any other cheap restaurant in the entire land, where democracy has begun with food and clothing and adjectives, and often promises to end there.

Most of the diners were black workmen, a few of them in overalls. But, with a feeling of having neighbors now in the Negro world, Neil saw John and Mary Woolcape and greeted them more readily than he ever had S. Ashiel Denver & wife. And in the village talk with the Brewsters and Sophie and Ash and Martha, over the ham and cabbage, he could join more familiarly now.

It is not, perhaps, a remarkable fact that a good deal of that talk should have been concerned with the woes of Negroes. Well, and if Neil had heard a good deal of it before, he had also repeatedly heard everything that Mr. Prutt and Mr. Denver had to say about the woes of bankers and Rod Aldwick about the woes of serious lawyers and duck-hunters.

The liveliest topic tonight was the Reverend Dr. Jat Snood, who was probably the nastiest piece of goods in Grand Republic.