.

If you go straight away from Levees and Government House Lists, past
Trades' Balls--far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your
respectable life--you cross, in time, the Border line where the last
drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in. It would be
easier to talk to a new made Duchess on the spur of the moment than
to the Borderline folk without violating some of their conventions or
hurting their feelings. The Black and the White mix very quaintly in
their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish
pride--which is Pride of Race run crooked--and sometimes the Black
in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and
strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this
people--understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the
man who imitated Byron, sprung--will turn out a writer or a poet; and
then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime,
any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or
inference.

Miss Vezzis came from across the Borderline to look after some children
who belonged to a lady until a regularly ordained nurse could come out.
The lady said Miss Vezzis was a bad, dirty nurse and inattentive. It
never struck her that Miss Vezzis had her own life to lead and her own
affairs to worry over, and that these affairs were the most important
things in the world to Miss Vezzis. Very few mistresses admit this sort
of reasoning. Miss Vezzis was as black as a boot, and to our standard of
taste, hideously ugly. She wore cotton-print gowns and bulged shoes;
and when she lost her temper with the children, she abused them in the
language of the Borderline--which is part English, part Portuguese,
and part Native. She was not attractive; but she had her pride, and she
preferred being called "Miss Vezzis."

Every Sunday she dressed herself wonderfully and went to see her
Mamma, who lived, for the most part, on an old cane chair in a greasy
tussur-silk dressing-gown and a big rabbit-warren of a house full of
Vezzises, Pereiras, Ribieras, Lisboas and Gansalveses, and a floating
population of loafers; besides fragments of the day's bazar, garlic,
stale incense, clothes thrown on the floor, petticoats hung on strings
for screens, old bottles, pewter crucifixes, dried immortelles, pariah
puppies, plaster images of the Virgin, and hats without crowns. Miss
Vezzis drew twenty rupees a month