“No whiter than we are,” smiled Ramón. “Not lily-white, at least.”
“And don’t you want peace?” she asked.
“I? I shouldn’t think of it. The meek have inherited the earth, according to prophecy. But who am I, that I should envy them their peace! No, Señora. Do I look like a gospel of peace?—or a gospel of war either? Life doesn’t split down that division, for me.”
“I don’t know what you want,” said she, looking up at him with haunted eyes.
“We only half know ourselves,” he replied, smiling with changeful eyes. “Perhaps not so much as half.”
There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which made her wonder, startled, if she had ever realised what real fatherliness meant. The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility, and the vulnerable compassion of man in his separate fatherhood.
“You don’t like brown-skinned people?” he asked her gently.
“I think it is beautiful to look at,” she said. “But”—with a faint shudder—“I am glad I am white.”
“You feel there could be no contact?” he said, simply.
“Yes!” she said. “I mean that.”