He drank himself to death inside six months. I read the news in a letter from his sister, the first and only letter I ever had from her. I had hurried back to the apartment in Paris one evening to be with the children during an air-raid, found the American mail arrived, and read it to the accompaniment of that anti-aircraft bombardment which was so familiar a part of the war to make the world safe for democracy. My letter from the country of democracy informed me that Fairfax had died, alone, before his sister could reach him. “He had been drinking again, I am afraid, from what they told me. I always felt so bad about Fairfax drinking, but he wouldn’t stop--he was just plain discouraged of life. He never touched a drop as long as our mother was living. He was always so sorry for our mother, and so good to her, though she was only a poor ignorant woman, who couldn’t read or write, and Fairfax was so smart. The teacher in our school wanted Fairfax to study to be a minister or a doctor, but he never would. He said he thought the more colored people try to raise themselves, the worse they get treated. He felt so bad, always, about the way colored people were treated. He said white folks wanted them to be low-down, so he was going to be. I used to tell him how wrong this was, and how the good white people weren’t like that, but he didn’t have any patience. Colored people have got to have patience. Our mother was always patient. And my husband and I manage pretty well. But Fairfax was proud. And colored people can’t be proud. I don’t believe he ever let you-all know how he liked the way the folks up your way treated him. He said their folks taught the white children to call him mister just like a white man, and that the white people used to ask him to parties and dances. He tried to go, he said, but at the door, he’d remember all the times when white people made a scene and called him a nigger and got mad if he even stood near them on the street, and looked at him that way white people do ... if you were colored you’d know what I mean. And then he just didn’t dare risk it. When he was a boy and something like that happened, it used to make him down sick so he couldn’t eat for days. And when he got up to where you live, it was too late. My husband and I had Fairfax taken to our old home town in Virginia and buried there beside our mother.” The air-raid was over when I finished that letter. The noisy bombardment of hate and revenge was quiet. The night was as still there in France as in the graveyard in Virginia. I was very thankful to know that Fairfax was sleeping beside his mother. We are back in Vermont now, the curtain lowered over air-raids and barrages. Everything goes on as before.