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.”

“John!” said Mrs. Woolcape.

“And so,” her husband continued, “I would—well, to tell the truth, Captain Kingsblood, I’m hanged if I know whether, if Phoebe wanted to marry a white boy, I would lock her in, or throw up my janitor’s cap and shoot anybody who tried to interfere with her rights!”

“Now John, stop being so racial,” said Mrs. Woolcape, but in a strictly routine way.

Emerson’s wife had taken the baby and gone home—somewhat pointedly. Neil knew that they were waiting for him to leave.

“I mustn’t stay any longer but–-Tell me. Is it hard to be a Negro? Here in the North, I mean—in Grand Republic? I’m not just being curious. I want terribly to know.”

The older Woolcapes and Emerson took wordless counsel, and Emerson answered for them:

“Yes, it is hard, unceasingly.”