“I can’t afford a new suit, but I’ve been careful about brushing and pressing this one.”

“There’s an ick, jam or something, on your tie.”

“I’m no fuss-Prutt!”

It was a family phrase which once they had found funny, but Vestal did not smile as she continued the attack: “And another sign of your losing your grip, and it worries me, is the fact that you want to run away from me so often. You spend so much time with these lowdown soapboxers, like this fellow Brewster—is that the preacher’s name?”

“It is, and you know it is. And let me tell you that I don’t spend a quarter as much time away from you, with my race—though I ought to—as I used to spend playing poker with Judd’s gang or going hunting and generally wasting time. You think my real interest as a boy crusader is a bore, whereas you used to think that my foolin’ with games was manly and noble.”

“I still do! As compared with these fanatic field-days where you and the other crackpots rearrange the world.”

“Vestal!”

“Well, I’m tired of it, tired clean through. I think I’ll take a little nap before I get supper. Tired! What really makes it hard for me, Neil, is that you’re two people: the boy I married and a Negro whose interests I don’t know at all. Which of them am I married to now?”

In his distress at never being able to chart Vestal’s loyalty, he went for counsel to his mother. It was a lively spring afternoon outside, with clouds playing tag with the sun, but his mother sat over solitaire in a room with the shades down, a chill ghost of a woman, like the soul of a baby in limbo.

He begged, “Mom, how can I persuade Vestal that she’s no worse off than millions of Negro women?”

“I don’t think you can, Boy, and she is worse off, if she thinks she is. I’m not sure but that you ought to tell her to go, go far off, when the new baby comes. You’ll be lonely—you got no idea how lonely—as lonely as you’ve made Joan and me. But I imagine things will get worse with Vestal and you. She’s a spirited girl. Maybe you ought to ask her to go before they do get worse.”

“Maybe.”

* * * * *

In late spring, when the snow still filtered down for half an hour now and then and veiled the plum blossoms and lilacs and flowering almond, but when the trees were almost in full leaf, that full-bodied ex-diplomat, Mr. Berthold Eisenherz, left his Florida villa and migrated home as though he were going into exile.