“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

“Oh, don’t you know? Well say, do all Negroes want to marry white women?”

“I doubt it very much, but I couldn’t say definitely.”

“That’s funny! I thought all you colored fellows knew all about such subjects like that.”

If there was anything comic in Mr. Topman’s effort to find a common ground with this Ethiopian, Kingsblood (whom he had known for only thirty-one years), the comedy faltered when he solicitously asked:

“If Vestal and you have another child, is there very much danger that it will be coal-black?”

* * * * *

Considering Biddy’s pellucidness, the question was funny, then, and slightly exasperating, but later, when he had heard it put half a dozen times and hinted at a hundred times, it was extremely exasperating and not funny at all. Neil had asked Ash Davis for the exact genetic facts, and learned, as definite, that with the union of a “colored” and a “white” person, the children will not have one chance in ten thousand of being darker than the darker parent. But he was to find that the universal folk belief, among such peasants as college-presidents and sewing-machine salesmen and popular lecturers, was that if any one with .000001 per cent. of Negro genes married anyone fair as alabaster (which is notoriously fair), their children were more than likely to be all of them as black as the heart of a dictator. The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!

Not for a time did it come to Neil that if such parents could have such an ebon child, it would still be their child to love.

* * * * *

Orlo Vay said to W. S. Vander, a fellow pillar of Sylvan Park, “He’s a sap, but he’s always been a good neighbor of mine, right across the street, and I’m not sure you could really call him a nigger, if he’s only one thirty-second.”

Mr. Vander growled, “My definition of a nigger is a fellow that publicly admits it and means it and so kicks himself right out of the human race, even if he ain’t but one-hundred and thirty-second part black.”

“I guess maybe you’re right,” admitted Orlo, not unwillingly.

Presently, throughout Grand Republic, the belief was fixed that Neil was—“if you want to know exactly”—one-quarter Negro.

* * * * *

Now, when he fled to the Davises and the Woolcapes, he pleasantly felt that he need not lie to Vestal about them. By grapevine, all of Mayo Street knew of his testimony at the club smoker, and they loved him—or just laughed. Without realizing how often, he was in a way of slipping out to John and Mary’s late in the afternoon, before he went home. And often, in an uneasy friendliness, as though he was waiting for something, he saw Sophie at Ash’s.