Finger-nail

Should a stranger suppose that they were white, he would soon be told that they were halfcaste. Should one doubt it, as passing strangers sometimes did, the children would be seized if unprotected and have the whites of their eyes and bases of their finger-nails searched for that bluishness which is supposed to be the evidence of black blood.

They overpowder and overperfume themselves, and color their finger-nails too harsh a color.

[…] turning listlessly about every now and then to look at the cigaretted women with their cool lip-sticked mouths, boredly listening to their boring male escorts, or boredly inhaling and boredly expelling, smoke, I mean, or jingling their gold bracelets with charms attached on their thin sun-tanned wrists, with elbows on table and cig-holders at eye-level – convenient, without moving, for taking the next drag, and convenient, too, for eyeing the finger-nails – with eyes just open under lids draped long […]