Grandpa Edgar looked pitifully old, and his passion drained out in futility. “Don’t you ever pay the least bit of attention to stories and dirty lies like that, Neil. It ain’t true, not a word of it, but even if it was, there’d be no need for anybody but us to know it. For God’s sake, boy, let’s never mention it again.”

Gramma Julie was very shrill. “Absolute lie, Neilly. Some folks in Hiawatha got it up because they was jealous of how well Ed and I done.”

It was intolerable to watch the two ancient and withered householders strip themselves naked, and Neil retreated, but with a brusqueness he could not avoid. “All right, all right, forget it. Well, got to be getting back. Night.”

On the train into Minneapolis he was irritable.

–-I’m sick of all this Gone With the Wind and Thomas Nelson Page stuff! massa on de ole plantation—massa in de cold, cold counting-house—swords and roses, and lick the damn nigger. If I’m a Negro—all right, I’ll be one.

–-I never needed a drink as bad as I do now.

But in the bar at the Hotel Swanson-Grand, he had orangeade, and dared not take so much as one highball. He wondered if he would ever drink another one, though highballs and he had been good friends. He looked at his many fellow-drinkers and thought of how they would turn into wolves and foxes and hyenas if his tongue were oiled enough to say what he could say.

* * * * *

All the way home, on the Borup, he resented the attentions of Mac. He wanted to growl, “Oh, chuck it. I belong with you.” He was exasperated by Mac’s obsequious laughter at the not-very-good jokes of Orlo Vay of Grand Republic, who was a lovely man when he stuck to fitting eyeglasses, but only then.

Neil wanted to demand of Mac, “How can you stand listening to that white flannel-mouth? Our people must have dignity.”

Not till he had almost reached home did it occur to him that his twenty-eight hours as a Negro was possibly too brief a training for him to take over all of his people’s manners.

* * * * *

Vestal usually saw through his blundering efforts to look cheerful when things had gone wrong, but when he came booming into the house with “Your husband has just bought all the banks in the Twin Cities!” when he kissed her and tousled Biddy’s hair in the best manner of the hearty young husband, she was not suspicious, and she said only, “Glad you had a nice trip. Isn’t it glorious about the end of the war! Can you stand a giddy round of bridge at Curtiss Havock’s tonight?”

“Yes, sure.”

Curtiss, son of Boone, would be the first to yelp at him.

* * * * *

He could decide nothing at all, since he could not decide the one dominant question: was he going to tell the world, would he even tell Vestal?