‘So you’ve come across partly to see that new man at the Westmoreland District Court, have you?’ he said sneeringly. ‘Well, I daresay he was considered fit company for gentlemen over in England, Mr Noel—people seem to have very queer ideas about what’s a gentleman and what’s not, over in England—but though I didn’t like to speak about it before Nora, seeing that they’re friends of hers, I think I ought to warn you beforehand that you mustn’t have too much to say to them if you want to get on out here in Trinidad. People here are a trifle particular about their company.’ Harry looked across curiously at the young planter, leaning back in awkward fashion with legs outstretched and half turned away from the table, as he sipped his coffee, and answered quietly, with some little surprise: ‘Why, yes, Mr Dupuy, I think our English idea of what constitutes a gentleman does differ slightly in some respects from the one I find current out here in the West Indies. I knew Hawthorn intimately for several years at Cambridge and in London, and the more I knew of him the better I liked him and the more I respected him. He’s a little bit too radical for me, I confess, and a little bit too learned as well; but in every other way, I can’t imagine what possible objection you can bring against him.’ Tom Dupuy smiled an ugly smile, and gazed hard at Harry Noel’s dark and handsome face and features. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, a malevolent light gleaming hastily from his heavy eyes, ‘we West Indians may be prejudiced; they say we are; but still, we’re not fond somehow of making too free with a pack of niggers. Now, I don’t say your friend Hawthorn’s exactly a nigger outside, to look at: he isn’t: he’s managed to hide the outer show of his colour finely. I’ve seen a good many regular white people, or what passed for white people’—and here he glanced significantly at the fine-spoken Londoner’s dark fingers, toying easily with the amber mouthpiece of his dainty cigar-holder—‘who were a good many shades darker in the skin than this fellow Hawthorn, for all they thought themselves such very grand gentlemen. Some of ’em may be coloured, and some of ’em mayn’t: there’s no knowing, when once you get across to England; for people there have no proper pride of race, I understand, and would marry a coloured girl, if she happened to have money, as soon as look at her. But this fellow Hawthorn, though he seems externally as white as you do—and a great deal whiter too, by Jove—is well known out here to be nothing but a coloured person, as his father and his mother were before him.’ Harry Noel puffed out a long stream of white smoke as he answered carelessly: ‘Ah, I daresay he is, if what you mean is just that he’s got some remote sort of negro tinge somewhere about him—though he doesn’t look it; but I expect almost all the old West Indian families, you know, must have intermarried long ago, when English ladies were rare in the colonies, with pretty half-castes.’