"No, but as I look back I think I have been a little off, perhaps."
"But you're putting behind you everything that is of you,"—his color rising with his voice as her secure conviction maddened him. "The life that is yours by nature and training. You're going blindly ahead into something you don't know, among people who are not yours!"
He became suddenly tense, as though the passion which he had repressed until that moment swept through him with a mighty urge. His breath slipped out in a long sigh.
"You are repeatedly mistaken, Dick. I have just found my people."
"Your people!" he scoffed.
She nodded.
"'East is East and West is West,' you know, and the two shall never meet. It must be true, and, if so, I have never been of the east. I never felt comfortable there, with the lies and the shams and the hypocrisies that were all about us. Out here, I do.
"Perhaps that is why you and I...." She shrugged her shoulders again. "You see, Dick, I have cast my lot here. The East is gone, for me; it never can pass for you. I have found my people; they are my people, their Gods are my Gods. I have a strength, a peace of mind, self respect, ambitions and natural, real impulses that I never knew before. I feel that I have come home!"
He laughed dryly, but she went on as though she had not heard:
"You have never understood me; you never can hope to now. There's a gulf between us, Dick, that will never be bridged. I am sorry, in a way. I never can love you and I hate to see you wasting your desires on me.