'You—have you not been a cage-bird?' asked Philip with some animation.
'Oh no, not I. I have kept outside the bars. I have been too fond of my liberty to venture behind them.'
'What do you mean by bars?' asked Philip, with some gravity in his tone.
'Bars? There are bars of all sorts—social, religious, conventional—but there! I shock you; you have lived so long behind them, that you think the bars form the circumference of the world, and that existence is impossible, or improper outside of them.'
'Beyond some none are at liberty to step. They are essential.'
'I am not talking of the natural, but of the artificial restraints which cramp life. Have you any Bohemian blood in you?'
'Bohemian!'
'Wild blood. I have. I confess it. A drop, a little drop, of fiery African blood. You in England have your class distinctions, but they are nothing beside our American separations between white and black. With you a blot on the escutcheon by a mésalliance is nothing; with us it is ineradicable. There is a bar sinister cast over my shield and shutting me out from the esteem of and association with those whose blood is pure. Pure! It may be muddied with the mixture of villainous blood enough—of swindlers and renegades from justice, but that counts nothing. One little drop, an eighth part of a drop, damns me. I do not care. I thank that spot of taint. It has liberated me from conventional bonds, and I can live as I like, and see the sun eye to eye without intervening bars.'
Philip had winced when she spoke about the co-existence of pure blood with that of swindlers and renegades. He stopped and looked back.
They had been walking fast, though up-hill. When talkers are excited and interested in what they say they naturally quicken their pace. They had far outstripped Salome; as Philip looked back he could not see her, for the ground fell away steeply and concealed the several folds of the road.