The reference to foreign service sent the two soldiers off on the shop-talk of veterans. Captain and Doctor Emerson Woolcape looked like a soldier, sounded like a soldier, had the very tune of it, and Neil reflected that if Emerson had little of the magic of that great leader, Major Rodney Aldwick, he seemed no less professional, as they traded opinions of B-29’s, rations, colonels and seasickness.

They were all seated now, though only Neil looked settled and comfortable.

Emerson’s niece, Phoebe, who had not yet been explained, was as bored by the droning of these venerable soldiers as any other seventeen-year-old American girl would have been. She was a graceful thing, breathless with youth; she was as gilt-headed as Biddy, as pink-and-white as Neil’s sister, Joan, and more restless. She sprang up now as a boy of her own age burst in.

He was thoroughly black, his features Negroid, yet in his blue Sunday suit and his beige sweater edged with maroon at the neck, he was completely the American High School Boy, shoulders proudly back, free and independent—probably too free and too independent, like his white classmates, who were the despair of their clucking teachers.

“This is Winthrop Brewster, our pastor’s boy. Phoebe and he are driving to Duluth for lunch,” said Mrs. Woolcape, as though that flight, seventy-odd miles each way, were a step across to the park.

Winthrop said How was he, Phoebe said Sorryhaftrunaway, with decently veiled joy at escaping from an old man of thirty-one, and they were gone in a blur, the same blur of gasoline fumes in which two other American children, Neil and Vestal, had flickered, only a dozen years ago.

And in just the tone of Vestal’s mother then, Mrs. Woolcape lamented, “I’m worried about that child. Our granddaughter Phoebe. Her mother and father have passed on, and we’re responsible for her. I’m sure I didn’t act like that when I was in high school and Oberlin. She seems to be simultaneously in love with Winthrop Brewster—he’s a wonderful boy; he’ll be a great expert in electronics or something after he goes to college, but Phoebe thinks Winthrop is too sober and fussy, and so, if you please, our young lady calmly up and announces that she is also in love with Bobby Gowse, who’s a wild stage dancer here, and with our neighboring boy, Leo Jensing. But Leo is white, so of course we wouldn’t like that.”

“Are you prejudiced against white people, then?” wondered Neil.

Her husband raged, “She certainly is, and I keep telling her that with her education—I only finished grade school, myself—she has no excuse for condemning a whole race. I tell her that if she is patient and looks for it, she’ll find just as many kind-hearted and understanding people among the whites as in our own race…. But I’m also somewhat opposed to intermarriage, though only because there are so many people, both white and black, who have been denied the power to love and so they are envious and do all the harm they can when they see a mixed couple who love each other so much that they are willing to stand social exile. Of course this whole color code is nonsense, but it’s so tied up with the old aristocratic class myth, like the D.A.R. or the English nobility (so I read), that you can’t ignore it any more than you can syphilis, which it greatly resembles.”