Neil was irritated.

* * * * *

To Neil at his desk in the bank, came Dr. Ash Davis, and Dr. Davis was a Negro, his face the color of dry brown bright autumn leaves in the sun. Neil had heard that one of the dismaying exigencies of the war had been that the Wargate experimental laboratory had had to hire this colored fellow, Davis—oh, a good enough chemist, a Doctor of Science from the University of Chicago, but still and all, just a darky. That certainly showed, didn’t it (agreed everybody at the Boosters Club luncheon), how hard-up we were for manpower. Though it was a question whether any conceivable contribution to the war effort could justify a precedent like that, of giving a white man’s job to a tough dinge. God knows what it might lead to!

Oh, yes, Neil had heard of Ash Davis.

For the first time in his life he really looked at a “colored man.” He had never looked at Belfreda, at the Emerson Woolcape who had been in his class all through school, at Mac, at the Negro soldiers; he had not looked at them but only been impatiently aware of them, as though in Arabia he were searching for a road-sign in English or French or some human language, and found nothing but an absurd sign in Arabic. Certainly he had never looked at the Negro callers who had arranged with him for bank loans. They had been merely dark hands holding papers, dark voices that were over-ingratiating.

He looked now at Ash Davis, but he did not see a “Negro,” a “colored man.” He saw a curiously charming man of the world who seemed also to be a scholar. He was pricked by the familiar feeling, “Where have I known him before?” He realized that here, plus an extra tan, was Captain Tony Ellerton of the army transport, his one completely ungrudging friend.

Dr. Davis was a man of forty, slim, compact, very easy, not tall, wearing a small black mustache without foppishness. His eyes were steady. He was dressed like any other well-to-do professional man, but he wore his gray lounge-suit with a vaguely European air. Had Neil been Sherlock Holmes, he might have detected in Dr. Davis’s accent an Ohio boyhood, three years in England and France and Russia, friendships with tennis-partners and piano-teachers and laboratory-mates. But he knew only that Dr. Davis spoke clearly and pleasantly, rather like Rodney Aldwick, but more accurately.

He was, in fact, deciding, “This Davis is a bright-looking fellow. I didn’t know there were any Negroes like him. Well, how could I? I’ve never even had the chance to see them.”

(As a matter of fact, a few months before, Neil had sat opposite Dr. Ash Davis in a bus, had heard him talking to a large Negro with a clerical collar, and had never looked at either of them.)

Dr. Davis had, he said, come to beg.

With the war over, hundreds of Negroes would be dismissed from local factories, and the leaders of the Negro community were working with the Urban League in trying to persuade local business firms to give them jobs. Could the Second National hire one or two? He could produce a number of colored business-school graduates who in wartime had been clerks, bookkeepers. How about it?