She would not let him go with them. She was full of enterprise and benevolence, though Biddy did ruffle her by a certain over-enthusiasm about going to see “Uncle Ash and Aunt Martha and darling, darling Nora.” Biddy had made detailed plans for the presentation of a play and a grand opera by herself and Nora (whom she had never seen), this coming summer, and when Neil explained that Nora would no longer be here, Biddy waved all such triviality away, as blithely arrogant as her mother.

–-I guess that’s all to the good. Bid will be like Winthrop. She’ll say, “Certainly I’m colored. I also have one crooked toe. So what!”

On that cold April afternoon, after lunch, Vestal started beamingly off for the bus, with Biddy prancing under the skeleton maple trees. They were to be home at five. At a quarter past four, they returned, silent.

“Don’t be such a baby—take your own coat off, and skip upstairs and play,” Vestal ordered Biddy, while Neil was rigid. His “Well?” was cautious.

“If you must know, it didn’t go so well. Oh, they were just as pleasant as they could be, and they do have a nice house, but–-Maybe it had nothing to do with their being colored, maybe they’re just too intelligent for me, but I caught myself wishing that I were at Judd Browler’s, talking about vegetable gardens. And Nora was just too darned nice and patronizing to our poor moron child. Neil, are you so sure you really want me to try and feel natural with your highbrow buddies—all these Hindus and Koreans and Zionists and Nigerians? I do get so sick of propaganda. I’m not sure I can do it, my dear. I’m not sure it will go. At all.”

Neither was Neil.

* * * * *

Ash had not yet found his teaching job (he had given up calling it a college position), but he had sold his house through Frank Brightwing, who was very jovial about “you darkies” and had willingly persuaded the purchaser to pay almost half the value. Ash believed that jobs would be more easily found in the educational slave-market of New York, and he was leaving Grand Republic—probably forever, lamented Neil.

Vestal said abruptly, No, she did not think she wanted to go with him to see the Davises off. Besides, she couldn’t run away from her job that way! Whether she meant to or not, it seemed to Neil that she was reminding him that she, the tragic white woman, was toiling to support a vagrant Negro, and that such heroism was too uncomfortable to last.

Grand Republic was proud of its new Union Station and the waiting-room, the Great Hall, of gray limestone with murals of the explorers Radisson and Groseilliers, David Thompson, Le Sueur, Lieutenant Pike, the Sieur Dulhut. Neil plumed himself, “Xavier was one of those fellows. Biddy and I belong with them, not with the Prutts and Wargates—those parvenus!”