Oliver Beehouse was short and solid, with a fringe of fine, sand-colored hair about his huge freckled tonsure. He was always pouting all over his pale but freckled face at the contemplation of the perfidious attacks on capitalism. Brother Morton, taller and four years younger, substituted a small liver-spot on his right cheek for Oliver’s freckles.

Pat Saxinar and Vestal and Joan giggled together, thinking how old-fashioned were the house and their elders, who were muttering about the reason for this parliament, while Neil’s mother sat reserved and frail, and Dr. Kenneth ambled about with mystery and lemonade.

Such was the grand jury when Neil came in.

They smiled upon him, for if there really was trouble ahead, no one could be more depended upon for common sense than good old Neil.

Dr. Kenneth, fluttering his hands, looking frightened, cried, “Now you young people please get up off the floor and all be properly seated. Oliver, you take that big green-plush chair. Now please let me have your close attention.

“My son Neil, who hitherto has been a boy to be proud of and with a lovely wife and daughter, has astonished me by wanting to do something of which I violently disapprove, in fact you might say it appals me, something of which, as I understand it, even Vestal hasn’t the slightest idea, and which I shall certainly not tolerate without his first asking all your advice, and which he will now confess to you. Neil!”

Dr. Kenneth sank on a frail gilt chair, and Neil was sick with pity for his father, but he stood out and spoke gravely, like a man on the scaffold with no more hope of reprieve:

“I have learned that my mother—she may not even know it—is descended from one Xavier Pic, who lived from about 1790 to 1850, and who was a brave and honorable pioneer on the Northern Minnesota border, an ancestor to be proud of, and who was also a full-blooded Negro. Which makes every one of us, technically, either a Negro or the close relative of one.”

He got only so far before he was whelmed by the fury, the denials, the shouts that he was insane. Vestal was burning with an unspoken astonishment that he had told her nothing, burning and rigid. Only his mother and Pat were altogether quiet. He held up his hand and the hecklers slowly stopped. He chronicled the story of Gramma Julie, the discoveries of Dr. Werweiss, and he wound up:

“A few months ago I would have been scared or apologetic about telling you this, but now I see that the only apology is to the Negroes, the Indians, the Orientals, for the wrongs that have been done to them for hundreds of years–-”

Oliver Beehouse, not even rising, took charge:

“So, young man, you propose to correct those wrongs by hideously wronging all of us, your friends and family, who have never given you anything but loving assistance—to ruin even your wife, my own niece! Will you kindly stop your self-pity and your self-dramatization? I think you’ve been shameless enough, for one evening!”