“We only half know ourselves,” he replied, smiling with changeful eyes. “Perhaps not so much as half.”
There was a certain vulnerable kindliness about him, which made her wonder, startled, if she had ever realised what real fatherliness meant. The mystery, the nobility, the inaccessibility, and the vulnerable compassion of man in his separate fatherhood.
“You don’t like brown-skinned people?” he asked her gently.
“I think it is beautiful to look at,” she said. “But”—with a faint shudder—“I am glad I am white.”
“You feel there could be no contact?” he said, simply.
“Yes!” she said. “I mean that.”
“It is as you feel,” he said.
And as he said it, she knew he was more beautiful to her than any blond white man, and that, in a remote, far-off way, the contact with him was more precious than any contact she had known.
But then,