“No? Well, I think I’ll walk a few blocks before I turn in.”

He rather wanted to be unfaithful to his oppressive wife, as regularized young husbands often do when they are sorely puzzled, when they feel that new and’ surprising caresses of warmer arms might provide a rational explanation of everything. He very much wanted to telephone to Sophie Concord.

And so, after five minutes of cold air and loneliness, he came home and argued with Vestal till midnight.

February had come in, and the sidewalks were perilously icy under the shifty covering of snow. Cars stalled and slipped backward when they tried to run up the hills, and the chains about the tires as they hit the fenders flapped all day long in an irritable chorus.

In the Capital of the Nation, a few Southern Senators refused to let their fellow Titans even vote upon a bill to prevent employers from refusing jobs on the grounds of an applicant’s color.

Fort Sumter had been fired on again, and the Deep South had again seceded from the American Constitution, and this time they were supported by more Northern Copperheads. The new Jefferson Davis was yet to be chosen, but a clear statement of Southern ideals and a bugle-call to armed rebellion had been issued by that aristocratic old planter, Mr. David L. Cohn, who in the obliging Atlantic Monthly had recently stated:

“There are whites and Negroes who would attempt to break down segregation in the South by Federal fiat. Let them beware. I have no doubt that in such an event every Southern white man would spring to arms and the country would be swept by civil war.”

There was no Lincoln now to call for troops and, eighty-five years after it had started, the War Between the States was won by the South. And in a small frozen city in the North Central States, a Negro named Neil Kingsblood was having trouble in keeping his job, not because of any incompetence or incivility but because of his color—even though he did not have that color, and God still reigned and everything was mysterious in its wondrous lack of any sense whatever.

Chapter 42

“Considering the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and their excursions in the shadier portions of their empires and the handmaidens they brought home, considering the wanderings of the Moors southward in Africa and north in Europe, considering human nature on warm evenings in the South, it is probable that every ‘white person’ in Europe and the Americas, from British dukes up to Georgia politicians, has some trace of ‘Negro blood.’”

It was Clement Brazenstar holding forth, back in town and staying at the Woolcapes’. Neil was delighted to see that dark clown face again, but at this outrageous theory, he was offended. What would happen to the whole careful structure of his unhappiness if Vestal and John William Prutt and Wilbur Feathering and Rodney Aldwick could also be denounced as “colored”?