“Do you like it?” she said presently in an under voice.
“Yes, Madame. And you?”
“I love it, but not as I love the song of the freed negroes. That is a song of all the secrets of humanity and of the desert too. And it does not try to tell them. It only says that they exist and that God knows them. But, I remember, you do not like that song.”
“Madame,” he answered slowly, and as if he were choosing his words, “I see that you understood. The song did move me though I said not. But no, I do not like it.”
“Do you care to tell me why?”
“Such a song as that seems to me an—it is like an intrusion. There are things that should be let alone. There are dark places that should be left dark.”
“You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?”
“Yes.”
“I understand.”
After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought: