you have no natural feeling, Olive had complained. Why don't you let yourself go once in a while? There was at least this much truth in this criticism, Mary confessed to herself, that she did not let herself go. She had an instinctive horror of promiscuity, of being handled, even touched, by a man who did not mean a good deal to her. This might, she sometimes argued with herself, have something to do with her white inheritance, but Olive, who was far whiter, was lacking in this inherent sense of prudery. At any rate, whatever the cause, Mary realized that she was different in this respect from most of the other girls she knew. The Negro blood was there, warm and passionately earnest: all her preferences and prejudices were on the side of the race into which she had been born. She was as capable, she was convinced, of amorous emotion, as any of her friends, but the fact remained that she was more selective. Oh, the others were respectable enough; they did not involve themselves too deeply. On the other hand, they did not flee from a kiss in the dark. A casual kiss in the dark was a repellant idea to Mary. What she wanted was a kiss in the light—with the right man, and the right man hitherto had never appeared. Now, thinking of Byron Kasson, she trembled as she gradually became aware of what sort of acknowledgment she was dragging out of her innermost soul. It startled her somewhat to perceive how little unwelcome to her it would be to encounter this man
