"Dear Potch," she said; and she had put back the hair from his forehead with a gesture tender and pitiful.
Her glance and gesture were always tender and pitiful. Potch realised it. He knew that he worshipped and she accepted his worship. He was content—not quite content, perhaps—but he assured himself it was enough for him that it should be so.
He had never taken Sophie in his arms without an overwhelming sense of reverence and worship. There was no passionate need, no spontaneity, no leaping flame in the caresses she had given him, in that kiss of the evening, and the slight, girlish gestures of affection and tenderness she gave as she passed him at meals, or when they were reading or walking together.
As they lay on the plains this evening they had been thinking of their life together. They had talked of it in low, brooding murmurs. The immensity of the silence soaked into them. They had taken into themselves the faint, musky fragrance of the withered herbage and the paper daisies. They had gazed among the stars for hours. When it was time to go home, Sophie sat up.
"I love to lie against the earth like this," she said.
"We seem to get back to the beginning of things. You and I are no more than specks of dust on the plains ... under the skies, Potch ... and yet the whole world is within us...."
"Yes," Potch said, and the silence streamed between them again.
"I'll never forget," Sophie continued dreamily, "hearing a negro talk once about what they call 'the negro problem' in America. He was an ordinary thick-set, curly-haired, coarse-featured negro to look at—Booker Washington—but he talked some of the clearest, straightest stuff I've ever heard.
"One thing he said has always stayed in my mind: 'Keep close to the earth.' It was not good, he said, to walk on asphalted paths too long.... He was describing what Western civilisation had done for the negroes—a primitive people.... Anyone could see how they had degenerated under it. And it's always seemed to me that what was true for the negroes ... is true for us, too.... It's good to keep close to the earth."
"Keep close to the earth?" Potch mused.