A little spasm crossed his face.  He shook his head, as though to shake off a clinging filament of importunate thought.

“What’s the trouble?  Do they need money, the school?” asked Marise with a vague idea of getting up a contribution.

“No, my cousin didn’t say anything about that.  It’s not so simple.  It’s the way the Negroes are treated.  No, not lynchings, I knew about them.  But I knew they don’t happen every day.  What I hadn’t any idea of, till her letter came, was how every day, every minute of every day, they’re subject to indignity that they can’t avoid, how they’re made to feel themselves outsiders and unwelcome in their own country.  She says the Southern white people are willing to give them anything that will make good day-laborers of them, almost anything in fact except the thing they can’t rise without, ordinary human respect.  It made a very painful impression on my mind, her letter, very.  She gave such instances.  I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.  For instance, one of the small things she told me . . . it seems incredible . . . is that Southern white people won’t give the ordinary title of respect of Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. even to a highly educated Negro.  They call them by their first names, like servants.  Think what an hourly pin-prick of insult that must be.  Ever since her letter came, I’ve been thinking about it, the things she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and refine themselves, how they’re made to suffer intimately for trying to be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be.”  He looked at Marise with troubled eyes.  “I’ve been thinking how it would feel to be a Negro myself.  What a different life would be in front of your little Elly if she had Negro blood!”

Marise had listened to him in profound silence.  Sheer, unmixed astonishment filled her mind, up to the brim.  Of all the totally unexpected things for Mr. Welles to get wrought up about!

She drew a long breath.  How eternally disconcerting human beings are!  There she had been so fatuously sure, out there on the walk home, that she knew exactly what was in that old white head.  And all the time it had been this.  Who could have made the faintest guess at that?  It occurred to her for the first time that possibly more went on under Mr. Welles’ gently fatigued exterior than she thought.

She found not a word to say, so violent and abrupt was the transition of subject.  It was as though she had been gazing down through a powerful magnifying glass, trying to untangle with her eyes a complicated twist of moral fibers, inextricably bound up with each other, the moral fibers that made up her life . . . and in the midst of this, someone had roughly shouted in her ear, “Look up there, at that distant cliff.  There’s a rock on it, all ready to fall off!”

She could not be expected all of a sudden, that way, to re-focus her eyes.  And the rock was so far away.  And she had such a dim sense of the people who might be endangered by it.  And the confusion here, under the microscope of her attention, was so vital and immediate, needing to be understood and straightened before she could go on with her life.