“But I mean—in a crisis, with women, or in a panic.”
“Of course you can. You’ve got in mind the ignorant and superstitious coolie, but what about the ignorant and superstitious cockney or any other corresponding class? Both have to be kept decent as a last resort at the nose of a pistol. There’s no difference there.”
“And you think there’s no difference between us and them?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. The Chinese are superior to us in subtlety, endurance and some mental capacities. And they never needed to have lawyers till we obtruded our pleasant casualness about debts upon them.”
She laughed. “You may be right, dear. But I should be surer of the Anglo-Saxon mind for all that.”
“H’m! How much do you think you know about mind? What does one ever know about anybody’s mind? Some of us fuss because we don’t know what is going on on the other side of the world. Why, the fact is we don’t know what is going on in the same room with us. Sit down at Mac’s to dinner with twenty men, your Anglo-Saxon mind. You don’t know how many of them are heading for black despair, or why, or how many of them have the least idea of what they’re after in the world, or what things really matter to any of them, and if you knew them for ten years you might not find out. You don’t know what goes on inside any person.”
Valerie wriggled to a sitting position in the hammock.
“I’ve often thought that about you. All kinds of things go on inside you at the back of those eyes of yours, things I shall never know.”
“Nothing that need ever frighten you, dear, really.” He put a hand on one of hers.
“I don’t know. The despairs that people face are often more fearful to others than to themselves.”
