“Well, maybe they are, but think of beaver-dams and, uh, war-bonnets. Aren’t they wonderful?”

“No.”

“But why do you object to their being a little dirty? It’s just smoke from cooking. After all, Daddy’s little girl gets pretty dirty, too, sometimes!”

“They look like niggers.”

“And what’s the matter with—Negroes?”

“I don’t like ‘em.”

“Did you ever know one?”

“Yes.”

“And just who, now, besides Belfreda?”

“Little Eva.”

“She wasn’t a Negro. She was white.”

“I didn’t like her.”

“May I put it to you, Elizabeth, that you are being a horrid little girl?”

“With a curl in the middle of my forehead?”

“Oh, hell!”

“Oh, Daddy, you said it, you did—you said ‘Hell.’ Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell!”

In the midst of her feminine seizing of an advantage, Biddy was so enchantingly pink and white and gleeful that he loved her despairingly and realized, like cold dough in his brain, that all the cheerful little viciousnesses of common belief among nice people are more devastating than bombs and great wings.

Because he had a fortnight of leisure, because it occurred to him that Vestal was “the white wife of a colored man,” he studied her as they loafed on the lichen-cushioned rocks. She was less intelligent and worldly-wise than Nurse Concord, he thought, less warm and beautiful, but possessed of more clarity and control. She was a “fine type of young American matron,” clean, athletic, well read—well, well-enough read—and Interested in What Goes on in the World. She had a piety adequate for Sylvan Park, and derision of sentimentality. She had, indeed, everything, except any individuality whatsoever.

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being. Vestal had never known suffering except in child-birth, nor any upsetting surprise and doubt except on her wedding-night.

In one thing she was clearly superior to a good many virtuous women: she did not enjoy intentional cruelty. But Neil was discovering that unconscious cruelty can be very effective.

Vestal, remembering old days, kept singing, “Coon, coon, coon, how I wish my color would fade.”

–-That’s what I am. What Biddy is. A coon. A moke. A boogie. Something so grotesque that a fine lady like Vestal couldn’t imagine hurting its feelings.

Prince trotted up, shaking off a shower of mud, and Vestal scolded him, “We shouldn’t have changed your name, dog! You’re no prince. You’re nothing but a dirty, good-for-nothing nigger!”

And smiled at Neil so trustingly.

* * * * *