“You!––a white lady! a noble! say this to comfort me; why?” asked the girl. She had risen again and stood back of the chair. She looked half frightened.
“I say it because, if you study such questions earnestly, you will perceive how the opinion of those self-crowned judges will dwindle; they will no longer loom above you because of your race. My child, you are as royal as they by nature. It is the cultivation, the training, the intellect built up through generations, by which they are your superiors today. If your own life is commendable you need not be ashamed because of your race.”
Kora turned her head away, fingering the rings on her pretty hands.
“You––it is no use trying to make a lady like you understand,” she muttered, “but you know who I am, and it is too late now!”
She attempted to speak with the nonchalance customary to her, but the entire interview, added to the conversation in the corridor, had touched depths seldom stirred, and never before appealed to by a woman. What other woman would have dared question her like that? And it was not that she had been awed by the rank and majesty in which this Marquise moved; she, Kora––who had laughed in the 86 face of a Princess whose betrothed was seen in Kora’s carriage! No; it was not the rank, it was the gentle, yet slightly imperious womanliness, back of which could be felt a fund of sympathy new and strange to her; it appealed to her as the reasoning of a man would appeal; and man was the only compelling force hitherto acknowledged by Kora.
The Marquise looked at her thoughtfully, but did not speak. She was too much of a girl herself to understand entirely the nature before her or its temptations. They looked, really, about the same age, yet for all the mentality of the Marquise, she knew Kora was right––the world of emotions that was an open book to the bewitching octoroon was an unknown world to her.
“The things I do not understand I will not presume to judge,” she said, at last, very gently; “but is there no one anywhere in this world whose affection for you would be strong enough to help you live away from these people who speak of you as those men spoke, yet who are themselves accountable for the faults over which they laugh together.”
“Oh, what you have said has turned me against that Trouvelot––that dandy!” she said, with a certain vehemence. “He is only a Count of yesterday, after all; I’ll remember that! Still; it is all the habit of life, Madame, and I never knew any other. Look here; when I was twelve I was told by an old woman to be careful of my hands, of my good looks every way, for if I was handsome as my mother, I would never need to do housework; that was the beginning! Well!” and she smiled bitterly, “I have not had to do it, but it was through no planning of theirs.”
“And your mother?”
“Dead; and my father, too. He was her master.”