He could hear Vestal reprimanding him, “You should have thought of all this before you went off half-cocked.”

He could hear Wilbur Feathering wallow, “H.w.y.l.y.d.t.m.a.N.?” And how, he interrogated himself, would he like to have Biddy marry a boy like Winthrop Brewster?

–-Why not, if Win would stand for anything so dictatorial and bouncing as Biddy! He’s the most charming and intelligent boy I know.

–-How incorrigibly the white man I am—Nature’s most devastating freak, after the earthquake and the bubonic plague; debating whether Winthrop is as good as his obvious inferiors, and thinking I’m such a courageous soul for debating it!

Of that debate he did not tell Vestal.

* * * * *

When Orlo Vay started off for his optical shop in the morning in his well-heated car and saw that nigger, Kingsblood, a beggar who hadn’t even a car or a hired girl, crawl off down the windy street to start his daily search for a job, and when the fellow stumbled on the snow-upholstered ice and danced and waved his arms like a human top in his effort to keep his balance, then Orlo laughed with moral joy.

But Virga, Mrs. Orlo Vay, nervously brought a maple-layer cake across the Street to Vestal who, as she furiously vacuumed and dusted the house, did not know whether to feel touched or insulted. For Mrs. Vay had belonged to a distinctly lower layer in that creamy social cake that was Sylvan Park—till now she had.

Chapter 44

Vestal did not care for this hermit business. She loved parties, all kinds of parties. She did not hold with sitting around at home and having noble principles.

Her father, who was one of the most high-minded inventors of civic duties, who believed that both matrimonial and electric-lighting contracts were drawn up in Heaven, was nevertheless urging her to leave her wedded husband, come home, and be divorced. Then she would again be able to go, panoplied in Caucasian superiority, to evening carnivals where you ate lobster Newburg and played “Who am I?” If it did not work out, he promised, he would send her off to live in some scenic locality where the taint in Biddy was unknown.

When she dropped in to see her father, he looked up from his desk as though the desk itself were looking up, and said steadily, “Why duck your fate, Vessy? I have talked it over with your Uncle Oliver and with Reverend Yarrow, than whom there are no greater believers in the sanctity of marriage—when it’s a real marriage. But they agree with me that you cannot look at it as a genuine bond when you were betrayed into wedlock with a homicidal maniac, a degenerate, or a Negro, and when a man is more or less all three–-We don’t want a divorce from this fella Kingsblood; we want an annulment.”

“Nuts.”

“What did you say?”

“I said ‘Nuts.’”

“Do you think that’s respectful?”