“Woman of the Cross-roads!” he went on whimsically, “who have the East and the West in your veins—what do you think?”
Warring impulses rippled for a moment across Isabel’s face. As she stood there, torn by contentions of her race, her remarkable emotions in play, Julie perceived how different she was from every other woman in the room. Here was a woman who thought as deeply as any of them, who certainly transcended all of them in beauty and gifts, and yet who, nevertheless, belonged beyond the margin.
Some resentful flame burned through her discretion. “Under a master, can personality be preserved?”
“But yet a little while we must tarry, to lay down the foundation stones,” Matfield explained.
“Seven times seven civilizations are buried under the soil of Asia. Wait till you get as crowded as we are over here, till the very oceans are disputed—then behold the earth running with blood, and the seas on fire. You of the West struggle to expurgate from the East its human passions. You strive to teach it to inhabit your high altruistic plateau. But, you, yourselves, shall yet at some supreme urge revert to the most stupendous of those human passions. In one concentrated hour all your elevated mankind shall be at one another’s throats like wolves. You will do well to keep the East quiet then while you tear out one another’s hearts.”
Barry alone after this explosion regarded Isabel with impartial interest. “It’s horrible, of course!” he told Julie in an undertone, “but you know every time she talks like that, I almost believe her. She sounds like St. John, and I’ve always had an inkling that he was dead right. The Armageddon! Toppling thrones! But it won’t happen in my time!”
“You seem sorry!”
“Why shouldn’t I want to take part in the renewing of the earth?”
“It exhilarates you and depresses me. This is struggle enough for me. You see, I have ten million timid grandmothers back of me and it is some task to give them all a jolt.”