"Ah, but if we are more than animals, if we reason, we do choose whom we marry! Marriage is not merely a question of personal whim, impulse or passion. It's the one divine law on which human society rests. There are always men who hear the call of the Beast and fall below their ideals, who trail the divine standards of life in the dust as they slink under the cover of night——"
"At least, I'm not trying to do that!"
"No, worse! You would trample them under your feet at noon in defiance of the laws of man and God! You're insane for the moment. You're mad with passion. You're not really listening to me at all—I feel it!"
"Perhaps I'm not——"
"Yet you don't question the truth of what I've said. You can't question it. You just stand here blind and maddened by desire, while I beg and plead, saying in your heart: 'I want this woman and I'm going to have her.' You've never faced the question that she's a negress—you can't face it, and yet I tell you that I know it's true!"
The boy turned on his father and studied him angrily for a moment, his blue eyes burning into his, his face flushed and his lips curled with the slightest touch of incredulity:
"And do you really believe all you've been saying to me?"
"As I believe in God!"
With a quick, angry gesture he faced his father:
"Well, you've had a mighty poor way of showing it! If you really believed all you've been saying to me, you wouldn't stop to eat or sleep until every negro is removed from physical contact with the white race. And yet on the day that I was born you placed me in the arms of a negress! The first human face on which I looked was hers. I grew at her breast. You let her love me and teach me to love her. You keep only negro servants. I grow up with them, fall into their lazy ways, laugh at their antics and see life through their eyes, and now that my life touches theirs at a thousand points of contact, you tell me that we must live together and yet a gulf separates us! Why haven't you realized this before? If what you say about Helen is true, in God's name—I ask it out of a heart quivering with anguish—why haven't you realized it before? I demand an answer! I have the right to know!"