Roger: "Quite so. Well then, we have only to deal with Carrie as a possible wife to one of our young men...."

Mrs. Stott: "As a matter of fact, Riemer proposed to her a few months ago. But Carrie is very particular; and besides, she wouldn't marry a German...."

Roger: "What nonsense! In what way are they inferior to Englishmen or Australians? I'm sure Riemer..."

Mrs. Stott (tightening her lips): "Not to be thought of. Riemer is an avowed atheist..."

Roger: "Oh, of course, if religion is to come in the way...."

Mrs. Stott: "It isn't only religion, there are other things. No. Don't let my daughters come under discussion. Why couldn't the Germans here send home for nice German girls to come out and marry them, or get married when they next went on leave...?"

Roger: "Why not, indeed? I'll talk to them. Much better they should do so. But then, what'll happen by and by is what you don't want to happen. The Germans will marry white women, have large families and gradually push out the Negroes and turn this into a White Man's country—unless the climate and the germ diseases forbid.... I'm not sure myself that I don't favour a mixture of races and that the Americans for example are not better suited to America because of their strong underlying element of Indian blood—I suppose you would not like it if the Germans married their concubines?"

Mrs. Stott: "As an Australian I am prejudiced against the mixture of the races..."

Roger: "Well, but Dame Nature isn't, in her inconsequent way. First she prompts the original human ancestors—your Adam and Eve—to segregate and separate and differentiate into sub-species, almost. Then she seems sorry for it, and does all she can to bring them together again, prompts the White man to travel all over the world and mix his blood freely with that of the other races. She has been redeeming the Negro from his original blackness and apishness by sending white immigrants into Africa for thousands of years—Egyptians, Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Indians; Portuguese, Dutch, French, English; to say nothing of all the Mediterranean peoples who pressed into Africa in prehistoric days. They have all mingled with the Negro in their time and rehumanized him. You own to a penchant for the Iraku people. Why? Even for the Masai. Why do you really prefer them to the out-and-out Negro type, like the Kindiga and Wambugwe? Because they have a strain of ancient white blood in their veins. Same thing with the Swahili. We like them because of the Arab intermixture. And yet we talk and write a lot of rubbish about disliking the half-caste between a European and a Negro—By the bye, since we are talking on this subject, did I or did I not see a half-caste child in the compound of Schnitzler, that mining engineer who is such a friend of Edgar's?"

Mrs. Stott: "You did, at least Schnitzler's native woman has had a child by him—two years ago. And if you looked all through the settlement you could find three other half-caste infants.... They make no secret of it...."