“This ‘at once’ business,” Wolfe had said, “is the whole difficulty. Some things, by the very nature of them, simply can’t be changed ‘at once.’ What we have now didn’t just pop up, for God’s sake; it was over a hundred years in the making! It’s easy to stop a man from raping your wife. But what if you had to stop him from hating her? What would you do then? Besides, you’re still talking all around the point. Which is: the wrong can be corrected, it is being corrected, it will be corrected . . . if only they will let us alone! Things are better now than they were five years ago. They’ll be better in another five, or would have been, anyway. The strain of prejudice is getting weaker with every generation, Tom. We don’t laugh at midgets in a circus any more. Why? Because we’re more sophisticated than our fathers were; we know that midgets are caused by a general endocrine deficiency. The same thing holds true here. We used to have a fundamental, economy-based need for segregation and prejudice; now we don’t. Since prejudice is an unnatural thing, it follows—”

“Do you believe that?” Tom had asked.

“Believe what?”

“That prejudice is unnatural?”

Jim had risen, then, and walked toward the cabinet that held the hi-fi components. “Why, anyone of intelligence—” he’d begun.

“What about the Jews? Around here, the Catholics? The Chinese? The Mexicans? The Poles? In some places, even the Irish? No; it isn’t unnatural. This ‘progress’ of yours is a nice little argument, only it doesn’t happen to be true. I believed it, until this business started; then I realized I was mistaken. Because if it was true, the decision wouldn’t have kicked up much trouble. The fact that it did kick up trouble—and that there might be more: how’d you say? ‘the worst kind of violence the South has known since 1860’—proves—can’t you see that, Jim?—that there hasn’t been any real progress, that it’s just an illusion we’ve hung onto to justify our failure to do anything about the matter. Your failure and mine. It’s us, the nice people, the intelligent, sophisticated people—we’re the ones to blame for this, not the ignorant hillbillies and the cheap neurotics! They have no power to act; we have, and always have had. But we didn’t act. The guilt is ours, and we’ve got to keep this thing alive because if we don’t, then we’ll know the guilt is ours and that wouldn’t be pleasant, would it! Not a damn bit pleasant.”

His voice had been tense, while Jim’s had remained for the most part calm and relaxed; now they both knew, with certainty, that the friendship that had been theirs was gone, forever and irretrievably gone.