He tried to make it airy and domestic.

All of New Year’s Eve, the only person who came in was Pat Saxinar, and she was so profusely enthusiastic about being colored—she had just discovered Harriet Tubman and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—that she annoyed that veteran race-crusader, Neil, as much as he had ever annoyed Corinne Brewster.

At one minute after midnight, Dr. Kenneth telephoned to them, and his voice was very old. “My dear boy, I do hope everything will go all right with you and yours, this coming year. I’m trying to get things straight, and God bless you, any way!”

–-It would be hard on Dad and his practice if his hand got shaky. Maybe I shouldn’t–-Too late.

* * * * *

Vestal was carefully careless with Biddy, these days; everything in her manner said breezily, “Oh, yes, dear, Mother is ever so happy.” But the child caught something of the shadow of horror that was moving through the house, and with it some notion that Negroes were aggravatingly important here. With the innocent hellishness of all Dear Little Ones, she restored Prince’s name, and went through the house calling “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger!”

Vestal was trembling with something like fury when she whispered to Neil, “Suppose Curtiss Havock heard that from next door? He probably knows, from his father. But if I try to shut the baby up, I’ll just make her worse.”

Late on a January night they heard that thin wailing, “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger” woven with the snow-wind.

“I am going up and make her stop that,” sighed Vestal.

Neil said, “Are you sure that was Biddy?”

Chapter 38

It broke suddenly.

Neil was at his desk in the bank on Tuesday, a week after New Year’s, when honest Judd Browler, whose house was well within sight of Neil’s but whom he mysteriously never seemed to encounter now, marched up and said, “Neil, as you know, I haven’t got any prejudices myself, but everybody seems to think I ought to protect my wife and daughter, so maybe it would look better if you and I just didn’t see each other from now on, when we can avoid it.” And lumped off without waiting for an answer.

Then, while Neil was chafed by Prutt’s constant watching, all the old friends attacked. Curtiss Havock shouted to his wife, when he saw Neil in the yard, twenty feet away, “Christ, there’s that nigger!” Elegant Eliot Hansen telephoned to Vestal a message that, translated from hints into English, meant that when she got tired of the shame of living with a colored man, he would gladly take her out for cocktails and see what he could do. (She told Neil.)

But the worst was passing Rodney Aldwick and having him croon like an Easter benediction, “Good morn-ing, Neil!”