She glanced down in hesitation at her fingers.
"Because people would know—"
"Know what?"
"That—that I'm not quite a white person."
I have never heard anything just so simple in my life or, for the matter of that, have I ever heard anything so pathetic. Not quite a white person! Great heavens, that whiteness or blackness should mean so much to us who in each other see the imagery of God! The blackest man and the blackest woman I have ever known were white. It is the color of the heart that matters.
"Take off that veil," I said suddenly. "Take off that veil and let me see. I don't want to find you a white person—it makes no difference to me."
I don't know why I spoke about myself. Surely too she must have wondered at it more than I. But my blood was hot with anger. Those old women, with their little ideas of family, believing one human creature made better than another, and that by the virtue of blind circumstance, they made me forget what I was saying.
"You've no reason to consider what the Miss Fennells think. They'll count for nothing when men and women are added up in heaven. Let me see for myself. Take off your veil."
It sounds, I admit, as though I had been rough with her, but it was not so. My voice, I am sure, was raised no more above the whisper. It was only that there must have been a different tone in it. And surely in a voice, in what not besides, that is everything. Whatever it was, she obeyed. I watched her hands as they rose to the knot in which the veil was tied at the back of her hat. Her finger-nails alone would have betrayed her secret; but they were wonderful, nevertheless. I have seen small shells on a sandy beach just like them; shells wet with the water from the receding tide.
At last the knot was loosened. She took away the veil and laid it in her lap. I count that one moment in which I have lived, that moment when, with the sudden glare of the sun, she closed her eyes and I was free to look undisturbed into her face.