“Yes, sir.” Though Starbuck had not confessed the full extent of his humiliating surrender to Dominique. He had admitted attending the theater night after night, but he had not described how he had lingered in the streets wanting a glimpse of his angel, or how he had written her name again and again in his notebooks, nor how he had tried to capture in pencil the delicacy of her long, misleadingly ethereal face, nor how he had yearned to repair the spiritual damage done to Dominique by her appalling history.

That history had been published in the New Haven newspaper that had noticed the Tom company’s performance, which notice revealed that although Mademoiselle Demarest appeared to be as white as any other respectable lady, she was in truth a nineteen-year-old octoroon who had been the slave of a savage New Orleans gentleman whose behavior rivaled that of Simon Legree. Delicacy forbade the newspaper from publishing any details of his behavior, except to say that Dominique’s owner had threatened the virtue of his fair property and thus forced Dominique, in an escape that rivaled the drama of Eliza’s fictional flight, to flee northward for liberty and the safeguard of her virtue. Starbuck tried to imagine his lovely Dominique running desperately through the Louisiana night pursued by yelping fiends, howling dogs and a slavering owner.

“Like hell I escaped! I was never a slave, never!” Dominique told Starbuck next day when they were riding the cars for Hartford, where the show would play for six nights in the Touro Hall. “I ain’t got nigger blood, not one drop. But the notion sells tickets, so it does, and tickets is money, and that’s why Trabell tells the newspapers I’m part nigger.”

“You mean it’s a lie?” Starbuck was horrified.

“Of course it’s a lie!” Dominique was indignant. “I told you, it just sells tickets, and tickets is money.” She said the only truths in the fable were that she was nineteen and had been raised in New Orleans, but in a white family that she claimed was of irreproachable French ancestry. Her father possessed money, though she was vague about the exact process whereby the daughter of a wealthy Louisiana merchant came to be performing the part of Eliza in Major Ferdinand Trabell’s touring Tom company. “Not that Trabell’s a real major,” Dominique confided to Starbuck, “but he pretends to have fought in Mexico. He says he got his limp there off a bayonet, but I reckon he more likely got stabbed by a whore in Philadelphia.” She laughed. She was two years younger than Starbuck but seemed immeasurably older and far more experienced. She also seemed to like Starbuck, who returned her liking with a blind adoration and did not care that she was not an escaped slave. “How much is he paying you?” Dominique asked Starbuck.

“Four dollars a week.”

She laughed scornfully. “Robbing you!”