As she leaves the club, Chuck sadly shakes his head. Bernice explains that Chuck is a musician she knew from school, but begins to cry when Rick argues that she left Richmond before the schools there were integrated. When Chuck approaches and takes her hand, Rick viciously hits him and orders him to take his hands off his wife. At a nightclub, Bernice nervously looks away after seeing that her brother Chuck is in the band. Leyton starts to suspect that Bernice has lied about her family. Bernice tells Rick's parents a number of lies about her family, who, she says, live in Richmond and cannot attend the wedding because they are leaving the country. Bernice tries to avoid Rick, but he insists that what matters to him is whether she loves him, and she admits that she does. In love with Rick, Bernice confides in Sally, who advises her not to tell Rick that she is black, because despite his feelings, he will have to tell his family, and they, Sally believes, will not allow the marriage. During a dinner party with Sally Roberts, Bernice's co-worker, and Jay Morgan, Rick's friend, Bernice is overcome by her feelings for Rick, but when he calls at three in the morning to propose marriage, she tells him it is too soon and that there is much he does not know about her. Bernice soon learns that Rick is from a wealthy old New England family. He admits he had tracked her down and they begin to date. One night, she attends a company cocktail party and runs into Frederick "Rick" Leyton, who earlier tried to flirt with her on the plane. She then packs her things and flies to New York, where, using the name "Lila Brownell" and passing for white, she gets a job as a secretary for an ad agency.
At an office building, Bernice is offered a job as an elevator girl and is told that if she had not written "Negro" as her race on her application form, she could have gotten secretarial work. Bernice assures her that she does not want to marry, but only get a job as a white girl. Gram, whose husband was white, says that if she had to do it over, she would not intermarry because of the problems it creates for the children. Bernice wants to quit school and get a job, and she asks why she cannot pass for white. The next day, Bernice talks to her grandmother about the incident and about school, where she has been snubbed by both white and black students after a white girl, whom she thought was her friend, told everyone she was passing for white. Chuck gets into a fight when a white man calls him "Rastus" and insults Bernice, thinking she is a white girl dating Chuck. Bernice Lee, a light-skinned black student, attends a nightclub in Los Angeles where her dark-skinned brother Chuck performs with his own jazz group.
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