“Some time you’ll tell me, please, won’t you?”
She glanced at her watch in surprise and arose hastily.
‚ÄúYes, with pleasure,‚Äù she said moving away‚ÅÝ‚Äîat first very fast, and then more and more slowly up the lane, with a puzzled look on her face.
She began to realize that in this pleasant little chat the fact of the boy‚Äôs color had quite escaped her; and what especially puzzled her was that this had not happened before. She had been here four months, and yet every moment up to now she seemed to have been vividly, almost painfully conscious, that she was a white woman talking to black folk. Now, for one little half-hour she had been a woman talking to a boy‚ÅÝ‚Äîno, not even that: she had been talking‚ÅÝ‚Äîjust talking; there were no persons in the conversation, just things‚ÅÝ‚Äîone thing: Cotton.
She started thinking of cotton‚ÅÝ‚Äîbut at once she pulled herself back to the other aspect. Always before she had been veiled from these folk: who had put the veil there? Had she herself hung it before her soul, or had they hidden timidly behind its other side? Or was it simply a brute fact, regardless of both of them?
The longer she thought, the more bewildered she grew. There seemed no analogy that she knew. Here was a unique thing, and she climbed to her bedroom and stared at the stars.