He tried to see the chief owners of the Hotel Pineland, but they were too busy. They were Dr. Henry Sparrock and Mrs. Webb Wargate, who was everywhere known as a Great Friend of the Negro. Dr. Sparrock was busy campaigning for the Red Cross, and Mrs. Wargate for the Suffer the Little Children League.

Drexel sneaked back to the three-room cottage which he shared with his daughter Garnet, and for a week he was ashamed to leave it. The tough boys from Texas and Arkansas, kicked out of Wargate’s and loafing around the Bar-B-Q, would have laughed at him.

Garnet said good-bye to Phil Windeck and went off to work in Chicago. Drexel sold his house, and lived with his other daughter, Mrs. Emerson Woolcape.

He tried not to, but he could not help criticizing her cooking, her bed-making, and her care of the baby. He told himself—she did not tell him—that he would have to stay away from her house by day. He got a waiter’s job in a very nasty hash-house, from which he was discharged within a week, for criticizing everything in sight, including the overcharges. Albert Woolcape was willing to set him up in a chicken-joint of his own, but Drexel was suddenly afraid of responsibility.

For some months he sat on Emerson’s porch, wondering whether the no-count white waiters now at the Fiesole Room would understand that Mr. Randy Spruce had to have four lumps in his coffee—things like that, which only Drexel understood.

Drexel died alone, suddenly, during a summer thunderstorm. Garnet came back for his funeral, and gave up all notion of marrying Phil Windeck, who was running whisky into Oklahoma, in partnership with Sugar Gowse. Garnet is now a civil-service stenographer in Chicago, lonely and chaste, she who was so ripe for love.

When the Fiesole Room had changed to white waiters, Randy Spruce had made another entry in the Sant Tabac books, and chuckled. Poor dear fuzzy Randy, who was some day to be caught in a scandal with a telephone operator and to skip town. He did such a lot of evil, but all so innocently. If he had ever asked himself why he hated Negroes, he would probably have found that he did not hate them. He had never really met one. He meant so well. They say he has a wonderful job now with the Atomic Bomb Perfume Company.

* * * * *

Select portions of that April might have been called spring, even in Grand Republic. As he made pyramids of early daffodils in the showcase, Neil whistled, with a feeling that he had never been anything but a devoted florist.

Mr. Brandl looked anxious over his morning mail and over a couple of unexplained telephone calls, during which he answered nothing but “Yes” and “I see.” After scratching his hands and worrying his soft gray bush of hair, he trembled, “Neil, I keep hearing where you are a friend of a Dr. Davis, that is a very bad Negro agitator. I would like to stand by you, but I know from the war what tattle and rumor can be like. I could lose all my business, and I have an old wife.”