And, suddenly, she didn’t at all care. She said, lightly, but firmly: “But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t at all care to be owned. Even by you.”

The drooping lids lifted. The look in the blue eyes was, Helga thought, like the surprised stare of a puzzled baby. He hadn’t at all grasped her meaning.

She proceeded, deliberately: “I think you don’t understand me. What I’m trying to say is this, I don’t want you. I wouldn’t under any circumstances marry you,” and since she was, as she put it, being brutally frank, she added: “Now.”

He turned a little away from her, his face white but composed, and looked down into the gathering shadows in the little park before the house. At last he spoke, in a queer frozen voice: “You refuse me?”

“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, she felt, explain. It would be too difficult, too mortifying. She had no words which could adequately, and without laceration to her pride, convey to him the pitfalls into which very easily they might step. “I might,” she said, “have considered it once—when I first came. But you, hoping for a more informal arrangement, waited too long. You missed the moment. I had time to think. Now I couldn’t. Nothing is worth the risk. We might come to hate each other. I’ve been through it, or something like it. I know. I couldn’t do it. And I’m glad.”

Rising, she held out her hand, relieved that he was still silent. “Good afternoon,” she said formally. “It has been a great honor—”

“A tragedy,” he corrected, barely touching her hand with his moist finger-tips.

“Why?” Helga countered, and for an instant felt as if something sinister and internecine flew back and forth between them like poison.