“Have you proof, Professor?” the girl asked, as she arched her brows.
“None definite. But––well, what if she were a negress? Hers is the most brilliant mind in the entire student-body!”
But, no. Race segregation is a divine tenet, scripturally justified. What though the girl’s skin vied with the lilies and rosebuds? What though her hair was the brown of ripe 28 fields? Had not God Almighty decreed that the negro should remain a drawer of water? A hewer of wood? Had the Lord designed him the equal of the noble white, He would have bleached his face, and bridged his flat nose. Miss West was a Southerner. And the reference to her dark-skinned sisters caused a little moue of disgust, as she flatly declined to consider Carmen an eligible candidate for membership in her Society.
“Lord above!” ejaculated Hitt, who had been brooding over the incident as he walked home with Father Waite. “That toadying, sycophantic, wealth-worshiping Miss West can see no farther than the epidermis! If we could have maintained Carmen’s reputation as an Inca princess, this same girl would have fawned at her feet, and begged to kiss the edge of her robe! And she would have used every art of cajolery to ingratiate herself into Carmen’s favor, to catch the social crumbs that our girl might chance to drop!”
“There, there, Hitt,” soothed Father Waite. “Have you any idea that Carmen is at all injured by Miss West’s supercilious conduct?”
“Not in the least!” asseverated Hitt vigorously. “But it makes me so––!”
“There, check that! You’re forgetting the girl’s influence, aren’t you?”
Hitt gulped his wrath down his long throat. “Waite,” he blurted, “that girl’s an angel! She isn’t real!”
“Oh, yes, she is!” replied Father Waite. “She’s so real that we don’t understand her––so real that she has been totally misunderstood by the petty minds that have sought to crush her here in New York, that’s all.”
“But certainly she is unique––”