Emerson hastened, “Of course we will. I didn’t mean to be smug. I just don’t like being branded as a kind of barnyard animal. But Captain, if you’d really enjoy a red-hot race-talk, wait till my brother Ryan comes in. He’s only twenty-three, but he can be as wonderful and wrong as if he were ninety. He’s on leave—hopes to be out soon, but he’s still in the service, as I am; he’s a sergeant, and how he does look down on us captains! Ryan’s been out in India, and way he tells it, he was hobnobbing with Gandhi and Nehru, though they may not have noticed it. And Burma.”

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.