“Oh yes, but there's something besides to get over. Please look at me closely. Does it strike you that there is anything to be proud of in having blue-black wispy hair like mine, that's always falling where it's not wanted?”
“Goodness knows, Miss Spoelmann, you've got glorious hair!” said Klaus Heinrich. “I know that you are partly of Southern extraction, for I've read somewhere that your grandfather married in Bolivia or thereabouts.”
“He did. But that's where the trouble lies, Prince. I'm a quintroon.”
“A what?”
“A quintroon.”
“That goes with the Adirondacks and the refraction, Miss Spoelmann. I don't know what it is. I've already told you that I don't know much.”
“Well, it's a fact. My grandfather, thoughtless as he always was, married a woman of Indian blood down South.”
“Indian blood!”
“Yes. She was of Indian stock at the third remove, daughter of a white and a half-Indian, and so a terceroon as it is called. She must have been wonderfully beautiful. And she was my grandmother. The grandchildren of a terceroon are called quintroons. That's how things are.”
“Most interesting. But didn't you say that it had affected people's attitude towards you?”