“In other words, he has been acting just like a nigger, Mr. Siles!” she told her husband. “And he’s taken up with a girl who’s not of the best, to say the least, even if she does go to the high school. Mrs. Francis Cannon, who lives near her, tells me that this Pansetta has boys at her house all the time, and her mother is never at home until after dark. She’s a cook or something somewhere.... A fine person for a nephew of ours to associate with, this Pansy daughter of hers!”

“Pansetta’s a nice girl,” said Sandy. “And she’s smart in school, too. She helps me get my Latin every day, and I might fail if she didn’t.”

“Huh! It’s little help you need with your Latin, young man! Bring it here and I’ll help you. I had Latin when I was in school. And certainly you don’t need to walk on the streets with her in order to study Latin, do you? First thing you know you’ll be getting in trouble with her and she’ll be having a baby—I see I have to be plain—and whether it’s yours or not, she’ll say it is. Common girls like that always want to marry a boy they think is going to amount to something—going to college and be somebody in the world. Besides, you’re from the Williams family and you’re good-looking! But I’m going to stop this affair right now.... From now on you are to leave that girl alone, do you understand me? She’s dangerous!”

“Yes,” grunted Mr. Siles. “She’s dangerous.”

Angry and confused, Sandy left the room and went upstairs to bed, but he could not sleep. What right had they to talk that way about his friends? Besides, what did they mean about her being dangerous? About his getting in trouble with her? About her wanting to marry him because her mother was a cook and he was going to college?

A white boy in Sandy’s high-school class had “got in trouble” with an Italian girl and they had had to go to the juvenile court to fix it up, but it had been kept quiet. Even now Sandy couldn’t quite give an exact explanation of what getting in trouble with a girl meant. Did a girl have to have a baby just because a fellow walked home with her when he didn’t even go in? Pansetta had asked him into her house often, but he always had to go back uptown to work. He was due at work at four o’clock—besides he knew it wasn’t quite correct to call on a young lady if her mother was not at home. But it wasn’t necessarily bad, was it? And how could a girl have a baby and say it was his if it wasn’t his? Why couldn’t he talk to his Aunt Tempy about such things and get a clear and simple answer instead of being given an old book like The Doors of Life that didn’t explain anything at all?