Junius P. Easton tossed back his head and erupted.
“I’ll be damned if I will,” he shouted, “and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you hob-nob with this fellow either. I’ve stood a lot from you Fannie, but there’s a limit. I didn’t put up much of a holler last winter when you had that greasy Esquimeaux here that evening with that polar explorer and I’ve stood for Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiians, South Sea Islanders, snake charmers, Bolshevists, shimmy dancers, poets and short haired female nuts, but I’m going to draw the line on darkies and don’t you forget it.”
J. P. strode over to a long table, opened a humidor, extracted another cigar and savagely bit the end of it off. His sister was as unruffled as the placid surface of a mountain lake on a hot mid-summer day. She laughed a little before replying. It was such an irritatingly serene sort of a laugh that J. P. winced at the sound of it.
“You poor, dear, foolish man,” she said with the patronizing condescension of an indulgent aunt rebuking a fractious boy aged about eight years. “He isn’t a colored man. You can be perfectly ridiculous at times.”
“Well, he’s the next thing to it, isn’t he?” inquired her brother helplessly.
“Don’t be absurd, J. P. He is the descendant of kings and potentates and mighty warriors and he’s quite the most fascinating man I’ve ever met. To know him is a privilege. He calls to your soul and bids you voyage with him to the heights where you can leave behind you the petty affairs of life and commune with the eternal and the unknowable.”
“Oh, bunk,” retorted her brother testily. “You give me a pain. The heights, eh? If you take a trip up there you’d better be sure before you start that you’ve got a return ticket. You’re likely to get all tangled up in the cosmos and the eternal and lose your way as well as your mind. And take a tip from me, old lady. Choose some other companion besides that coffee colored harem keeper if you want to keep your friends.”
“My dear brother,” returned Miss Fannie, in a perfectly even tone of voice. “I feel extremely sorry for you. You are of the earth earthy. You have no soul. When the infinite calls you cannot hear it. I, fortunately, am so attuned and delicately adjusted that it reaches me, and I can pulsate in harmony with its vibrations. I know because the dear prince told me so. It’s just wonderful.”
“Oh——piffle,” retorted J. P. impotently as he threw up his hands in a gesture of hopeless despair and tore angrily out of the room with the bitter realization that he had once more suffered defeat.
Miss Fannie Easton smiled indulgently and fondled a jade ring on her left hand, a ring which Prince Rajput Singh had slipped from his own royal finger and given her with the whispered expression of a hope that she would wear it as a token of their friendship. Assuring herself that no one was looking she kissed it long and ardently as something akin to a rapturous look crept into her foolish, lusterless eyes.