Neil pondered, “I must meet some white people some day. Phil, when you get very mad, do you think about machine-guns?”

“I start to, and then I won’t let myself. God, these whites will never know the patience the colored peoples have shown, all over the world. It’s like the patience of God himself.”

Neil had never been able to talk thus, freely, passionately, romantically, profanely, with Judd Browler or Elegant Eliot Hansen. But he realized, as he drove home, that his Vestal would welcome Judd or Eliot, but not Phil Windeck, not the dripping car-washer, not a man called “Hey you, boy!”

* * * * *

He had made the last payment on their house.

“It’s sure-enough ours, forever!” he rejoiced, and they danced through the blue and maroon living-room, the sunporch, the small crystal and mahogany dining-room.

“Honestly, Neil, wouldn’t you think it was a perfectly charming house, even if you had no idea who it belonged to?” she cried with loving enthusiasm.

“I certainly would!”

It did not seem the moment to inform her that they now had only $767.61 in the bank, with his war pension not large enough to make a vast difference, and that his masquerade, as a young white gentleman pretending to be a job-hunting Negro, was losing its romance with rapidity.

But he had to tell her, in a few days, that he had no prospects of work whatever.

“I guess you’ll have to help me find something—anything,” he confessed.

Vestal went into action. She let Shirley go, but so gracefully that Shirley left with a kiss for Biddy and a warm farewell to Vestal as to a fellow-victim of them guys in Wall Street.

Vestal cut down on their food, rejected the almost obligatory movie, menacingly eyed Prince’s undiminished appetite, and abruptly told Biddy that, no, she could not have a pony.

Then they sold the car. In the United States, that is the same as saying, “Then they sold their four daughters into slavery.”

They got a satisfactory price, in the post-war shortage. But not to own any sort of car was an acknowledgment of social death, for a Prosperous American Business Man, for a Busy and Popular Young Matron who was trying to keep up her rank while her oldest friends were staring at her as though they had just met her and didn’t think they liked her.

As a substitute for the other gifts which Biddy wanted from moment to moment, Vestal had bought for her a fifteen-cent book of “comic strips.” Looking through this enterprising literature, which in America had replaced the Brothers Grimm and The Wind in the Willows, Neil found that no few of the cartoons dealt with Negro characters, clownish and vile.

But, in weariness with sermons, he said nothing; he merely stole the opus from his own daughter and threw it into the furnace and sat down to a season of agitation about Biddy’s future as a Negro. What school, what job, what marriage would she have when It was publicly admitted?