"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?"
"You don't understand, Prince. I must tell you that Indian blood over there means a heavy blot—such a blot, that friendships and affections are transformed into hatred and abuse if proof of half-blood descent comes to light. Of course things are not so serious with us, for with quad-roons—why, of course, the taint is nothing like so great, and a quintroon is to all intents and purposes untainted. But in our case, exposed to gossip as we were, it was naturally different, and several times when the people shouted abuse after us I heard them say that I was a coloured girl. In
