“But,” persisted the sailor, “have I convinced you that, if this brutal and iconoclastic world but knew it, my little Tamea is all Caucasian, not merely half?”
“Captain, your daughter is the most dazzling, the most glorious woman I have ever seen.”
“Would you care to marry her, Monsieur Doctor?” The words shot out from the man who had been condemned to a living death with calm but deadly earnestness. “That is,” Larrieau continued, “provided you are not already married.”
“I am engaged to be married, Captain.”
“You have seen Tamea. It will not be hard to forget the other woman. Come, come, my boy! How does the proposition strike you?”
“It doesn’t strike me at all. One does not accept such a proposition for consideration quite so abruptly, my friend.”
“Ah, why not? Why not, indeed? Because others do not? Blood of the devil, what a horrible thing is tradition! If it were not a tradition that a woman shall accept from her fiancé a diamond ring which the idiot cannot, in all probability, afford to give her—well, women would not accept them. If it were the custom, they would accept a blow or a brass ring through the nose or a brand, with equal eagerness. Monsieur Doctor, he who has not learned to accept both good and evil, the usual and the unusual, abruptly and without mature consideration, has not learned to live. Life has not given him of its richness and fulness. Why be afraid? Why shrink from the silly comment of silly people who do not understand when you have a woman with a glorious body, a glorious soul and a glorious mind, to compensate you?”
“I am not free to marry her——”
Gaston of the Beard brushed aside this feeble excuse with a quotation from Epictetus: “‘He only is free who does as he pleases.’”
But the young doctor was not to be persuaded by such philosophical considerations.