Dr Whitaker played nervously with the knob of his walking-stick. ‘I feel sure, Euphemia,’ he said at last, ‘these petty discriminations between shade and shade are the true disgrace and ruin of our brown people. In despising one another, or boasting over one another, for our extra fraction or so of white blood, we are implicitly admitting in principle the claim of white people to look down upon all of us impartially as inferior creatures.—Don’t you think so, Mr Hawthorn?’
‘I quite agree with you,’ Edward answered warmly. ‘The principle’s obvious.’
Dr Whitaker looked pleased and flattered. Edward stole a glance at Marian, and neither could resist a faint smile at Miss Euphemia’s prejudices of colour, in spite of their pressing doubts and preoccupations. And yet, they didn’t even then begin to perceive the true meaning of the situation. They had not long to wait, however, for before the Whitakers rose to take their departure, Thomas came in with a couple of cards to announce Mr Theodore Dupuy, and his nephew, Mr Tom Dupuy of Pimento Valley.
The Whitakers went off shortly, Miss Euphemia especially in very high spirits, because Mrs Hawthorn had shaken hands in the most cordial manner with her, before the face of the two white men. Edward and Marian would fain have refused to see the Dupuys, as they hadn’t thought fit to bring even Nora with them; and at that last mysterious insult—a dagger to her heart—the tears came up irresistibly to poor wearied Marian’s swimming eyelids. But Thomas had brought the visitors in before the Whitakers rose to go, and so there was nothing left but to get through the interview somehow, with what grace they could manage to muster.
‘We had hoped to see Nora long before this,’ Edward Hawthorn said pointedly to Mr Dupuy—after a few preliminary polite inanities—half hoping thus to bring things at last to a positive crisis. ‘My wife and she were school-girls together, you know, and we saw so much of one another on the way out. We have been quite looking forward to her paying us a visit.’
Mr Dupuy drew himself up very stiffly, and answered in a tone of the chilliest order: ‘I don’t know to whom you can be alluding, sir, when you speak of “Nora;” but if you refer to my daughter, Miss Dupuy, I regret to say she is suffering just at present from—ur—a severe indisposition, which unfortunately prevents her from paying a call on Mrs Hawthorn.’
Edward coughed an angry little cough, which Marian saw at once meant a fixed determination to pursue the matter to the bitter end. ‘Miss Dupuy herself requested me to call her Nora,’ he said, ‘on our journey over, during which we naturally became very intimate, as she was put in charge of my wife at Southampton, by her aunt in England. If she had not done so, I should never have dreamt of addressing her, or speaking of her, by her Christian name. As she did do so, however, I shall take the liberty of continuing to call her by that name, until I receive a request to desist from her own lips. We have long been expecting a call, I repeat, Mr Dupuy, from your daughter Nora.’
‘Sir!’ Mr Dupuy exclaimed angrily; the blood of the fighting Dupuys was boiling up now savagely within him.
‘We have been expecting her,’ Edward Hawthorn repeated firmly; ‘and I insist upon knowing the reason why you have not brought her with you.’
‘I have already said, sir,’ Mr Dupuy answered, rising and growing purple in the face, ‘that my daughter is suffering from a severe indisposition.’