“Eric, you’re fooling me, aren’t you?” she asked at last, slowly.
“No, it’s the truth.”
“But ... but, Eric, you look exactly like a white man! It can’t be true.”
“It is, just the same,” he answered, oddly relieved, now that he had blurted the thing out, and stoically waiting for her words to strike him. “I have just a small fraction of negro blood, as you see, and most people, like you, mistake me for a white man. God, how I wish I were coal-black—it would have saved me from the heartache that’s coming to me now!”
She looked away from him for a while, with a veritable mêlée of fear, brave indifference to the revelation, and self-doubt contending within her. Eric Starling was a negro, and she had fallen in love with him, and ... would she be averse to touching him, now? Would it make any difference? She reached for his hand and held it tightly for a moment, almost in an absurd effort to discover the answer to the question. Oh, what were words, anyway? He could tell her that he was negro until he became blue in the face, but he didn’t give her the feeling of one. Somehow, he just didn’t have the physical essence which she had always felt in the presence of other negroes, even those at the Vanderin party. He just didn’t have it. There was a fresh, lovely sturdiness attached to his body, and she wanted to be in his arms, and she couldn’t help herself. She loved him with every last blood-drop in her heart.
But the future, with all its ghastly dangers and troubles. If she married him, or if they lived together, her father and brothers would try to kill him, or injure him—she knew what they would do well enough, the stupid roughnecks—and her mother would weep and shriek, and perhaps try to kill herself, and other people would shun them, or make trouble for them. Even the dirty newspapers might take it up—hadn’t she read last week about a negro who had been hounded out of a New Jersey town because he loved a white girl and they wanted to marry each other? People were always like wolves, waiting to leap upon you if you dared to disregard any of their cherished “Thou Shalt Nots” ... just like wolves. The whole world seemed to be in a conspiracy to prevent people from becoming natural beings and doing as they pleased, even when their acts couldn’t possibly injure anybody. It was terrible.
And she herself, would she have courage enough to defy everything for his sake, and would her love for him continue in spite of all the threats and intrusions? She turned to look at him again. He was slumping down on the couch, with his hands resting limply on his outstretched legs, and his head lowered. All of her heart bounded toward him, and she flung herself against him and cried: “I don’t care what you are, Eric! I love you and I’m going to stick to you. I love you, Eric, dear one.”
With hosannas in his heart, he placed his arms around her, and they passed into an incoherence of weeping, and kissing, and whispered endearments, and sighs, and strainings. A full hour passed in this way before they could slowly return to some semblance of composure. Then, gradually, they tried to discuss the predicament facing them.
“You’re sure that you love me now, dear, but you’ve got to be doubly sure,” he said. “We won’t see each other for the next two weeks, and we’ll have a chance to think things over then. It’ll be hard, hard, but we’ve simply got to do it. Our minds will work better when we’re alone.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Eric,” she said, slowly, “but it wouldn’t change me any ’f I didn’t see you for a year, ’r a lifetime. Don’t be afraid of that.”