“My God, sir, you can’t kick me out of your home like this when you brought me to it, and made it an issue of life or death!”
“I tell you again you are crazy. I have brought you here against her wishes. She left the house with her friend this morning to avoid seeing you. Your presence has always been repulsive to her, and with me it has been a political study, not a social pleasure.”
“I beg for only a desperate chance to overcome this feeling. Surely a man of your profound learning and genius can not sympathise with such prejudices? Let me try—let her decide the issue.”
“I decline to discuss the question any further.”
“I can’t give up without a struggle!” the negro cried with desperation.
Lowell arose with a gesture of impatience.
“Now you are getting to be simply a nuisance. To be perfectly plain with you, I haven’t the slightest desire that my family with its proud record of a thousand years of history and achievement shall end in this stately old house in a brood of mulatto brats!”
Harris winced and sprang to his feet, trembling with passion. “I see,” he sneered, “the soul of Simon Le-gree has at last become the soul of the nation. The South expresses the same luminous truth with a little more clumsy brutality. But their way is after all more merciful. The human body becomes unconscious at the touch of an oil-fed flame in sixty seconds. Your methods are more refined and more hellish in cruelty. You have trained my ears to hear, eyes to see, hands to touch and heart to feel, that you might torture with the denial of every cry of body and soul and roast me in the flames of impossible desires for time and eternity!”
“That will do now. There’s the door!” thundered Lowell with a gesture of stern emphasis. “I happen to know the important fact that a man or woman of negro ancestry, though a century removed, will suddenly breed back to a pure negro child, thick lipped, kinky headed, flat nosed, black skinned. One drop of your blood in my family could push it backward three thousand years in history. If you were able to win her consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the black waters of a Negroid life! Now go!”