“Why?” At sight of the priest a cloud had come over Julie’s mood.
“He’s so solitary, by race and vocation. He’s only half white, and only half a man. He might as well be a magus up there in his tower, for all the participation he has in human living. Wouldn’t you be lonely if the gates of your soul’s territory were closed against you, if you were forbidden to love—ever? He has fire in his eyes, our padre. He wasn’t made to tend altars on high mountains.”
“It’s my firm conviction,” Julie declared, “that he tends very assiduously the fires of the insurrection. He hates us; he hates all white men.”
“Because we are what but for a little slip of fate he might have been. The tragedy, the wickedness of these racial Lucifers flung down to a lower world!”
“Do you know,” Julie said soberly, looking up at the Priest’s tower, “I fancy the padre doesn’t like me. These people don’t understand our women—the woman who walks through the world alone. To them she is an object of suspicion; to their mind her liberty signifies licence. For instance, to-night I oughtn’t to be here—and he’s looking down on me.”
“What does it matter what they think? So far as I am concerned they don’t exist. I am just serving my time,”—he closed his lips tightly; “counting the moments till I can get out and go home.”
A brooding distant look came into the girl’s eyes.
“To pass in and pass out? What good can that do? One should put the plow into the soil and not abandon it.”
“I should think you’d want to get clear of the uncleanliness of this territory of Baal. I’ve seen enough raw, bestial nature over here to make my soul revolt. The standards civilization has fought for go by the board here. One must be forever on the lookout in the heart of half savage society to keep from relapsing.”
“Just you wait till my boys grow up. Then there’ll come a change.”