“Well, I envy you, anyway,” she replied, sighing. “You’ve got to help me with my grammar—that’s the big, weak sister with me.”
“You can bet I will,” he responded, eagerly.
She was certainly an unusual girl—one who had somehow commenced to force her way out of a vicious, muddy environment. Since he had partially freed himself from the same thing, it was a sacred duty to help her. But he wouldn’t do it for that reason alone—he liked the jolly and yet pensive turn of her, and the undismayed and candid twist of her mind, and the soft irregularities of her face, which were charming in spite of their lack of a perfect prettiness, and the boldly curved but not indelicate proportions of her strong body. Of course, it was nonsense to believe that you could fall in love after several minutes of talking, and there was Lucia, the clever little hoyden whom he had gone with for two years now, and Clara, savage, beautiful, and dumb, and Georgie, keen-minded enough but a little hysterical at times, and promiscuous, and.... But after all, none of them except Lucia had ever aroused him to any depth of emotion, and even that had long since begun to wear off. She was mentally shallow—women usually turned out to be that, after you penetrated their little tricks and defenses. Would this girl prove to be of the same kind? Maybe, maybe, but there was one thing about her that he hadn’t found in any other women—the instant, frank, ingenuous way in which she had intimately revealed herself, without all of the wrigglings and parryings common to her sex. They sure did hate to get down to brass tacks.
He was an odd confusion of sentimentalities and cynicisms, and the conflict between them was often an indecisive one. As he looked at Blanche, a fear suddenly shot through him.... Lord, he had forgotten. The old, dirty scarecrow that would probably turn her away from him.
“D’you know, I was certainly surprised when I came here to-night,” she said. “I never imagined that negroes and white people—real, artistic ones, I mean—I never imagined that they went around with each other and made love together. I don’t know just how to take it. How would you feel if you met a good-looking, intelligent, negro girl and she became fond of you?”
He winced and his face tightened up. It was just as he had feared—she had mistaken him for a white man. Of course, he was white for the most part ... just a fraction of negro blood, but he was proud of it just the same, damn proud of it, and if people wanted to repulse him because of this fraction, they could go straight to the devil for all he cared.... Should he tell her now and have it over with? He hesitated. Despite his impatient pride he could not bring the words to his lips, as he had done many times before in such cases. White women often made this mistake, and he was inured to correcting it and bearing their constraint, or their shifting to a careful cordiality, but this time his self-possession had vanished. Sometimes he had failed to tell women, when he had only wanted a night or two of physical enjoyment with them, for then it never mattered, but ... some miracle had happened. This girl really seemed to have cut beneath his skin, and ... yes, he was afraid of losing the chance to see her again.
He didn’t love her now—in the deep, seething way that was the real thing—but he felt that if he continued to meet her he probably would, and this was a rare sensation to him. She would have to be told some time, of course, but ... not to-night. He simply couldn’t run the risk of spoiling this growing harmony between them, of not seeing whether it might flower out into an actual ecstasy. He couldn’t.
Blanche began to wonder at his lengthy silence, and she looked inquiringly at him.
“Please excuse me,” he said at last. “I was sort of ... sort of waltzing in a dream with you for a while.... Negroes and whites are human beings after all, and the fact that a man’s colored shouldn’t make him an inferior animal. But that’s an old story to me. I’ve got it all memorized. Race-prejudice, and fun-da-men-tal repugnance, and all the disasters that spring from intermingling. Oh, yes, these things exist in most people, of course they do, but I refuse to believe that exceptional men and women can’t rise above them. If they can’t, then what is exceptional about them?”
Something in the weary contempt of his words should have suggested to her that he was pleading his own cause, but her delighted immersion in him made her oblivious, and she mistook his words for those of a rarely unprejudiced white man. How eloquently and clearly he talked! He had an unassuming but fervent way that was far more attractive than Helgin’s suave, superior jovialities, or Oppendorf’s tired belligerency, or any of the other postures which she had noticed in different men at the party. Was she really beginning to fall in love with this Eric Starling? Somehow, she felt that no matter what faults she might discover in him afterwards, they would not be huge enough to destroy this present sense of communion with him. You had to trust to your instinct in such matters, and this instinct certainly hadn’t failed her up to date. Hadn’t she always doubted and feared Campbell, and held him at arm’s length, in spite of his smooth protests and promises? But gee, what if she were deceiving herself? This time it would be a real blow.