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doubt remarked, suspiciously — a distinct lack of tambourines and bones. (By the by, wasn’t it rather — er — presumptuous of him to call himself “Washington”?)
    She saw what her mind wanted her to see, and she saw little else. She would have interrupted a performance of
Othello
to request — with her steely glacial smile (her requests were more in the line of an order) — a rendition of “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” with Othello playing the banjo, and Iago and Desdemona enthusiastically grinning as they cakewalked.
    “In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear us darkies
    singing …”

    — Othello sang —
    “… In de ebening by de moonlight, you could hear de
    banjo ringing.
How de old folks would enjoy it …”
    (“Put out de light, and den put out de light,” Mrs. Albert Comstock’s Othello would soliloquize as — well, what did you expect? — he prepared to strangle Desdemona. “I hab done de state some service” — a likely story! — he would claim, later, when his crime was discovered. All those nasty black fingerprints on Desdemona’s nice white nightie!)
    There came that deep sigh again.
    “What a shame … What a shame …”
    Had she sometimes wondered where they all disappeared to after each minstrel show? Back to Dixie, perhaps, unable to bear missing all the fun?
    On her expeditions into New York City Mrs. Albert Comstock counted the number of black faces she saw in the street, and reported back to her daughter Myrtle.
    (There were certain things that de old folks did not enjoy much at all.)
    “Twenty-seven today,” she’d announce as she arrived back home: the day’s total would be the first words she spoke, as if she were giving a constantly changing password in order to achieve entrance.
    “Only nine today!”
    This could clearly be regarded as one of the better days: the lower the score, the more pleasing the result. Mrs. Albert Comstock was not biased. Negroes, Jews, Roman Catholics, foreigners (the rest of the world, most of the United States, whole neighborhoods in New York City, everywhere, really, that was not 5 Hampshire Square), the poor: she disliked them all equally.

5
    The crop from her upper lip mounted: several sacksful here, surely.
    “I have a son,” their father had said, laughing humorlessly (Bertha Rochester to the life; no, that was unfair: she understood and pitied Bertha Rochester), sneering, “who is prettier than any of my daughters.”
    Ben — who had been about ten at the time (she’d have been twenty: she was the eldest of the three sisters) — had blushed at the words, a deep, painful blush. She wasn’t sure whether Papa had said this to hurt her or to hurt Ben — he enjoyed hurting both of them, it was one of his more important hobbies — but Ben had shown the hurt more. It was strange — unsettling — to see so young a child blushing, as if blushing — by all the rules of normality — came later, one of the blood-led manifestations of maturity, and a normal child should be incapable of blushing. There had been something disturbingly knowing about a blush, a knowledge that should not have been possessed. “Papa! Papa!” Allegra had protested at his comment, not so much outraged for Ben’s sake, but outraged that her superior prettiness had not been acknowledged. Edith had said nothing, and
she —
as usual — had said nothing. She tended to let things build up inside her.
    Alice was sure that Maggie Tulliver and Jo March (dark-haired, dark-complexioned, both, other heroines she had adored as a child) possessed moustaches: George Eliot and Louisa M. Alcott had somehow forgotten to mention them. At the end of the Wilkie Collins novel, Marian Halcombe was not — unlike Laura, Lady Glyde — safe and protected in the arms of a husband. She was the plain one who looked on and smiled as her friend married the hero, the honorary maiden aunt of the children of the marriage.
    She had a moustache of her own: what