He knitted his brows. “I don’t like to think of your having enemies in this country.”
“They sprang up like a simoon in the desert. I was angry for a bit, but I can’t nurse a real good hatred in my soul for five minutes. It just peters out, and of course that puts me at a frightful disadvantage.”
A swift change came over the young man’s face, an inflexible sheath changing it into a mask of steel. “I can stay angry forever,” he said, frowning into the night. “I don’t mean that I have merely a bad temper. My mind simply will not expurgate an affront. I love and I hate for good,” he declared with concentrated passion.
Julie drew away a little.
“Oh, but why dwell on such things, you and I?” he went on. “All this would not have come out if you had not stirred to the bottom, where the truth dwells. I may be violent underneath, and hard with those who injure me, but there are any number of things to which I am inflexibly true. I am as inexorable one way as the other. I despise weakness of all kinds, and it is weak to let people hurt you. I don’t care what anybody says, if you let a person hurt you lie will despise you into the bargain. It’s too bad, but I can’t be changed—and I’m glad somehow that I made a clean breast of it to you.”
“You frighten me a little by the order that is all through you. Even your sins appear to have unity, whereas I keep house topsy-turvily in my innermost being. I have nothing filed there. I don’t know what will flash out at any moment. I am camping in the universe—and having for the present a tremendous time. Some policeman will come along some time and take me in because I haven’t built a house in creation. But just now there is adventure, and the glory of being alive under the tents of Kedar.”
She smiled up at the moon. “I wonder where I am heading?” she exclaimed. Her glance dropped, she stopped talking, and her face lit up softly; her attention claimed by something she seemed to see off in dusky space. Calmiden watched her for some moments where she stood on the step of the old convent with the moonlight flowing over her like a timeless river.
“What are you seeing off there?” he asked.
“Faces! Faces—startling ones that I saw in Manila—made by the New World. I often think and wonder about them—about one, more often!”
“A man’s!” Calmiden echoed blankly.