Quite unwittingly, the young Englishman had trodden at once on the very tenderest and dearest corn of his proud and unbending West Indian entertainers. Pride of blood is the one form of pride that they thoroughly understand and sympathise with; and this remote hint of a possible (and probable) distant past when the purity of the white race was not quite so efficiently guaranteed as it is nowadays, roused both the fiery Dupuys immediately to a white-heat of indignation. ‘Sir,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy said stiffly, ‘you evidently don’t understand the way in which we regard these questions out here in the colonies, and especially in Trinidad. There is one thing which your English parliament has not taken from us, and can never take from us; and that is the pure European blood which flows unsullied in all our veins, nowhere polluted by the faintest taint of a vile African intermixture.’ ‘Certainly,’ Mr Tom Dupuy echoed angrily, ‘if you want to call us niggers, you’d better call us niggers outright, and not be afraid of it.’ ‘Upon my word,’ Harry Noel answered with an apologetic smile, ‘I hadn’t the least intention, my dear sir, of seeming to hint anything against the purity of blood in West Indians generally; I only meant, that if my friend Hawthorn—who is really a very good fellow and a perfect gentleman—does happen to have a little distant infusion of negro blood in him, it doesn’t seem to me to matter much to any of us nowadays. It must be awfully little—a mere nothing, you know; just the amount one would naturally expect if his people had intermarried once with half-castes a great many generations ago. I was only standing up for my friend, you see.—Surely,’ turning to Tom, who still glared at him like a wild beast aroused, ‘a man ought to stand up for his friends when he hears them ill spoken of.’ ‘Oh, quite so,’ Mr Theodore Dupuy replied, in a mollified voice. ‘Of course, if Mr Hawthorn’s a friend of yours, and you choose to stand by him here, in spite of his natural disabilities, on the ground that you happened to know him over in England—where, I believe, he concealed the fact of his being coloured—and you don’t like now to turn your back upon him, why, naturally, that’s very honourable of you, very honourable.—Tom, my dear boy, we must both admit that Mr Noel is acting very honourably. And, indeed, we can’t expect people brought up wholly in England’—Mr Dupuy dwelt softly upon this fatal disqualification, as though aware that Harry must be rather ashamed of it—‘to feel upon these points exactly as we do, who have a better knowledge and insight into the negro blood and the negro character.’