“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.

“Clem won’t be back in town for weeks. But would you like to have dinner with Martha and me at my place—maybe Sophie, if I can get her? What about tonight?”

His lie to Vestal was almost automatic, this time. But he felt pitifully that he would not again be able to glow with her over her beloved gas-stove. She was a great lady in her assumptions; she was a poor child in her trusting heart.

When he sat with the Davises and Sophie at the table which had popped out from beneath a bookcase and turned all that end of the severe room into a dining-room, he had nothing to say. They belonged to a world that was closed to Our Mr. Kingsblood of the Second National; and the more taboo Sophie was, the more tempting were her soft, seal-brown hands, moving surely as a cabinetmaker’s or lying in peace.

He played with his food (which was plain hamburger steak, after excellent mushroom soup), and he demanded, “What are you three arguing about? Who is ‘the Turk’ and why is he a stinker?”

Sophie said, rather wearily, “He’s a colored fellow named Vanderbilt Litch—a usurer—the only suspected colored Quisling in town. But you wouldn’t be interested.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”