ngs she told me . . . it seems incredible . . . is that Southern
white people won't give the ordinary title of respect of Mr. or Mrs. or
Dr. even to a highly educated Negro. They call them by their first
names, like servants. Think what an hourly pin-prick of insult that must
be. Ever since her letter came, I've been thinking about it, the things
she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and
refine themselves, how they're made to suffer intimately for trying to
be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be." He looked at
Marise with troubled eyes. "I've been thinking how it would feel to be a
Negro myself. What a different life would be in front of your little
Elly if she had Negro blood!"

Marise had listened to him in profound silence. Sheer, unmixed
astonishment filled her mind, up to the brim. Of all the totally
unexpected things for Mr. Welles to get wrought up about!

She drew a long breath. How eternally disconcerting human beings are!
There she had been so fatuously sure, out there on the walk home, that
she knew exactly what was in that old white head. And all the time it
had been this. Who could have made the faintest guess at that? It
occurred to her for the first time that possibly more went on under Mr.
Welles' gently fatigued exterior than she thought.

She found not a word to say, so violent and abrupt was the transition of
subject. It was as though she had been gazing down through a powerful
magnifying glass, trying to untangle with her eyes a complicated twist
of moral fibers, inextricably bound up with each other, the moral
fibers that made up her life . . . and in the midst of this, someone had
roughly shouted in her ear, "Look up there, at that distant cliff.
There's a rock on it, all ready to fall off!"

She could not be expected all of a sudden, that way, to re-focus her
eyes. And the rock was so far away. And she had such a dim sense of the
people who might be endangered by it. And the confusion here, under the
microscope of her attention, was so vital and immediate, needing to be
understood and straightened before she could go on with her life.

She looked at the old man in an astonishment which she knew must seem
fairly stupid to him, but she could not bring out anything else. What
was it to her, whether a Negro physician was called Dr. or "Jo"?

Mr. Welles patted her hand, released it, smiled at her kindly, and stood
up. "I'm pretty tired. I guess we'd better