Quicksand
“Yes,” Helga repeated with intentional carelessness. “I refuse you.”
The man‘s full upper lip trembled. He wiped his forehead, where the gold hair was now lying flat and pale and lusterless. His eyes still avoided the girl in the high-backed chair before him. Helga felt a shiver of compunction. For an instant she regretted that she had not been a little kinder. But wasn‘t it after all the greatest kindness to be cruel? But more gently, less indifferently, she said: “You see, I couldn‘t marry a white man. I simply couldn‘t. It isn‘t just you, not just personal, you understand. It‘s deeper, broader than that. It‘s racial. Some day maybe you‘ll be glad. We can‘t tell, you know; if we were married, you might come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people. My mother did that.”
“I have offered you marriage, Helga Crane, and you answer me with some strange talk of race and shame. What nonsense is this?”
Helga let that pass because she couldn‘t,
196
