It was when he trudged out to look for more virile labor, like making figures in large books and saying, “The discount rate is one and a quarter per cent.,” that he was dreary; it was when he abandoned the refuge of home to go and be dutiful to the other members of his family that he was helpless. His brother Robert hated him, had resigned his job and was going off to anonymity in Chicago even before he should be divorced.

Sometimes Neil could work up a little rage in his own defense. Why couldn’t his family admit that they were, by the very definitions they had all maintained, Negroes, and face the world with Negro courage, not with the white mythology about the delights of exclusive clubs and polite churches and invitations to dull houses? Was this structure of anxious jealousies, this “good society,” so precious that, in losing it, his family had suffered very picturesquely?

Sometimes, aside from his mother, these people seemed not related to him at all. Much closer were not only Ash and Phil and Sophie but a youngster like Winthrop Brewster who, in the university, was studying electricity and manners, teleology and basketball, Sibelius symphonies and dancing with girls of all colors, and who at pipe-fogged “bull sessions” spoke up as briskly as any of the collegians who were the sacred descendants of Norfolk hedgers, Killarney potato-diggers, Welsh miners and French skunk-skinners. Why could Kitty and Charley Sayward not be as realistic as this boy?

It was hard to be so realistic himself as to demand that Vestal accept the fact that her two children would be “colored,” and learn to see all “colored” people as human. He was joyful when, on a Sunday morning, Vestal said eagerly, “Know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take Biddy and go call on Dr. and Mrs. Davis.” (She never did come to call them Ash and Martha.) “I want to have their little girl come play with Biddy some day.”

“But Nora is almost ten years older than Bid.”

She was touchy. “Of course if you don’t want me to call on your–-”

“No, no, no, no, I’d be delighted, and I do hope you’ll come to like them. You know, don’t you, that Ash has been fired?”

“So?”

She had no notion, clearly, that Ash’s discharge meant anything more to him than a like embarrassment to a white chemist. Ash was still in town only to sell his house, with a choice between being cheated by Frank Brightwing and gypped by William Stopple. He might not be in a mood to be patronized by Vestal, but she was so pleased with her own resolution that Neil tried to cheer it.