"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any Negro Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any negroes. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield Negro Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth too." "I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters--" "Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that I am not a lady." "My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I said even to suggest--" "Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort _says_ ... And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I were. But _if_ I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia added sharply. "My dear--!" he again protested. "Now, candidly, Rudolph"--relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling the cards--"just count up the number of times this month that my--oh, well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission in failing to be born a lady--has seemed to you to yank the very last rag off the gooseberry-bush?" He scoffed. "What nonsense! Although, of course, Patricia--" She nodded, mischief in her brightly-colored tiny face. "Yes, that is just your attitude, you beautiful idiot." "--although, of course--now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and--er, physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which--well! in which you sometimes do speak of them. It may sound old-fashioned, but I have always believed that decency is quite as important in mental affairs as it is in physical ones, and that as a consequence, a gentlewoman should always clothe her thoughts with at least the same care she accords her body. Oh, don't misunderstand me! Of course it doesn't do any harm, my dear, between us. But outside--you see, for people to know that you think about such things must necessarily give them a false opinion of you." Patricia meditated. She said, with utter solemnity, "Anathema maranatha! oh, hell to damn! may the noses of all respectable people be turned upside down and jackasses dance eternally upon their grandmothers' graves!" "Patricia--!" cried a shocked colonel.