“Will you please stop admiring your philosophy, and get to work?” Vestal was snarling now. Neil was looking appraisingly at a large and chunky vase.

“I certainly will, Ma’am! Lots of folks around here don’t want colored neighbors, and that’s the clux or the clue or whatever it is of the whole matter! They can’t understand that it isn’t Neil’s fault that he’s colored. But there you are: a sort of what you might call a growing resentment against you folks. And so maybe you would be happier in some other neighborhood… and a whole lot safer!”

He was too level-voiced for Vestal to go on being pert, and he continued more blandly:

“Mr. Berthold Eisenherz, who once owned all this property, a very fine man, is willing to take your place back at just what Neil paid for it, figuring that depreciation on the house and any appreciation on the lot will just about balance. This seems to me a very generous offer, very, and may I venture to advise you–-”

“Mr. Stopple, we had this all out before,” said Vestal. “You don’t seriously expect us to listen, do you?”

Don Pennloss came in. “Look, Vestal, we are here more as friends of yours than as authorized representatives of the property-holders. But we are that, too.”

Judd Browler blurted, “Neil, you got no idea how we’ve worked to keep certain neighbors from—well—demonstrating. They’re fed up. You can’t go on fooling with them. They simply will not tolerate a non-Caucasian living here and lowering the social tone of the community.”

Honorable Stopple said, “I hate to think of what some of the hot-heads might do—charivaris that would scare your sweet little girl—and worse.”

“Mayor, I just don’t like blackmail. Or blackmailers,” said Neil, and Vestal nodded.

Then Vander got to work. Mr. Vander had not gone to school with dear Neil nor gone to parties nor played hockey with him. He was twenty years older, and all his salad days had been pork-and-beans days and he had been in the Big Woods, freezing half the time and getting warm by fighting with axe-handles the other half. He loved both his family and his investments and he did not love Negroes or anybody who was not a Vander. He had a flat head, a stormy jaw, a steady, blue eye, and no sentimental objections to clubs, ropes, fire, or splinters under the nails. He was a good wholesale-lumber dealer, but he might have been a good sea captain, prime minister, executioner or lieutenant-general, and he barked now as one with authority, so that Prince woke up, under the couch, and barked back, and Vestal rose, to walk across the room and stand beside Neil.

“Blackmail, hell!” said Mr. Vander. “It’s going to be a lot worse than blackmail. You folks apparently got no idea how sore people are at having niggers right in their front yard. I know I am! I get damn sick and tired of paying my taxes right on the dot and then finding some Christ-forsaken Spig or Wop or Kike or Dinge–-”