She heard Judith asking in an astonished voice, “Why, what makes you think so?” and she listened with a tortured attention to the statement vouchsafed in an excited chorus by a great many shrill little voices that the Fingals’ old cook had taken a little too much whiskey for once and had fallen to babbling at the grocery-store before a highly entertained audience of neighbors, about the endless peregrinations of the Fingal family in search of a locality where the blood of the children would not be suspected—­“an’ theah motheh, fo’ all heh good looks, second cousin to Mattice!” she had tittered foolishly, gathering up her basket and rolling tipsily out of the store.

“Well—­” said Judith, “did you ever!” She was evidently as much amazed as her sister, but Sylvia felt with a sinking of the heart that what seemed to her the real significance of the news had escaped Judith.

The Five A girls came trooping up to Sylvia.—­“Of course we can’t have Camilla at the picnic.”—­“My uncle wouldn’t want a nigger there.”—­“We’ll have to tell her she can’t come.”

Sylvia heard from the other groups of children about them snatches of similar talk.—­“Anybody might ha’ known it—­singin’ the way they do—­just like niggers’ voices.”—­“They’ll have to go to the nigger school now.”—­“Huh! puttin’ on airs with their carriage and their black dresses—­nothin’ but niggers!” The air seemed full of that word.  Sylvia sickened and quailed.

Not so Judith!  It had taken her a moment to understand the way in which the news was being received.  When she did, she turned very pale, and broke out into a storm of anger.  She stuttered and halted as she always did when overmastered by feeling, but her words were molten.  She ignored the tacit separation between children of different grades and, though but a third-grader, threw herself passionately among the girls who were talking of the picnic, clawing at their arms, forcing her way to the center, a raging, white-faced, hot-eyed little thunderbolt.  “You’re the meanest low-down things I ever heard of!” she told the astonished older girls, fairly spitting at them in her fury.  “You—­you go and s-sponge off the Fingals for c-c-cakes and rides and s-s-soda water—­and you think they’re too l-l-lovely for w-words—­and you t-t-try to do your hair just the way C-C-Camilla does.  They aren’t any different today f-f-from what they were yesterday—­are they?  You make me sick—­you m-m-make m-m-me—­”

The big bell rang out its single deep brazen note for the formation of lines, and the habit of unquestioning, instant obedience to its voice sent the children all scurrying to their places, from which they marched forward to their respective classrooms in their usual convict silence.  Just as the line ahead was disappearing into the open door, the well-kept, shining surrey drove up in haste and Camilla and Cecile, dazzling in fresh white dresses and white hair ribbons, ran to their places.  Evidently they had heard nothing.  Camilla turned and smiled brightly at her friend as she stepped along in front of her.