“How do you happen to come to me?” fretted Neil. “I’d like to do anything I can, but I’m only an assistant cashier.”

Ash Davis had a smile that invited companionship. “Dr. Norman Kamber, who is a good friend of my race, told me you were one banker who could be quite human. I’m afraid that doesn’t sound too complimentary!”

“For Doc Kamber it does. Well, I’ll see what can be done. I really will!”

He tried to think of something that would hold Dr. Davis in talk. He acutely needed someone who understood this Thing that he had become. And the thoughts that had been growing pallidly in the darkness of his brooding became fresh and strong in the clear light of Ash Davis’s presence. He reflected, “This seems to be a very agreeable fellow and he has to beg white men for a chance for his people. It makes me mad that he should have to be almost obsequious to a louse of a bank clerk like me. He’s a lot smarter than I am. Well, Kingsblood, there is a chance for you, if you can recognize your superiors.”

He made talk, so far as he could, about jobs for Negroes, but he shyly did not know whether to say “Negro” or “colored people” or neither. Dr. Davis eased away and, for the second time in his life (the first was Borus Bugdoll), in this hand-mauling land, Neil was shaking hands with a Negro.

He seemed to suffer no injuries from it.

* * * * *

He put it cunningly to John William Prutt that, as they had several prosperous Negro depositors, and some day they might have more, perhaps they ought to hire one or two Negro clerks. Prutt looked at him pityingly.

“My boy, I’m pleased that you take a liberal attitude toward the Negro. I long for the day when they’ll get a decent education and be able to take their stand right alongside white laborers—in their own Southland. But they don’t belong up here, and the kindest thing to do is to let ‘em starve till it penetrates their thick heads that they ought to hustle back South…. Besides, our customers would kick like hell!”

* * * * *

On his way home, he stopped for a cocktail with his father. That gentle fusser fussed gently, “Got any furtherer on our royal path, Neilly?”

“I think maybe I have, Dad.”

* * * * *

He thought of Dr. Ash Davis by contrast that evening, for it was Rod Aldwick’s great homecoming party—staged by Rod himself, since no one else could stage it so well.

Major Rodney Aldwick of the Tank Corps, in private life lawyer and investor, graduate of Princeton and of Harvard Law, trained in National Guard maneuvers, tanned and tall and lean, with cropped Prussian hair, was a soldier, a gentleman adventurer, a hawk, a handsaw, a hero. To Neil, five years his junior, Rod in highschool days had always been the hero. Rod could do his algebra, correct his tango step, show him where the best pickerel camped in Dead Squaw Lake, coach him in hockey, reinforce him in wars with gangs of Poles and Italians, comfort him when Ellen Havock turned him down, lend him fifty cents, and explain the mysteries of taxes and the Trinity and why decent men like their fathers never voted the Democratic ticket. Not that Rod did do any of these heroic things for Neil, who had gone through boyhood pretty steadily on his own feet, but Neil had felt fervently that he would do them if he were asked.