s I love the song of the freed negroes. That is a
song of all the secrets of humanity and of the desert too. And it does
not try to tell them. It only says that they exist and that God knows
them. But, I remember, you do not like that song."

"Madame," he answered slowly, and as if he were choosing his words, "I
see that you understood. The song did move me though I said not. But no,
I do not like it."

"Do you care to tell me why?"

"Such a song as that seems to me an--it is like an intrusion. There are
things that should be let alone. There are dark places that should be
left dark."

"You mean that all human beings hold within them secrets, and that no
allusion even should ever be made to those secrets?"

"Yes."

"I understand."

After a pause he said, anxiously, she thought:

"Am I right, Madame, or is my thought ridiculous?"

He asked it so simply that she felt touched.

"I'm sure you could never be ridiculous," she said quickly. "And perhaps
you are right. I don't know. That song makes me think and feel, and so I
love it. Perhaps if you heard it alone--"

"Then I should hate it," he interposed.

His voice was like an uncontrolled inner voice speaking.

"And not thought and feeling--" she began.

But he interrupted her.

"They make all the misery that exists in the world."

"And all the happiness."

"Do they?"

"They must."

"Then you want to think deeply, to feel deeply?"

"Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die
without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole
nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing
really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to
grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun."

"I do not think you have ever been very unhappy," he said. The sound of
his voice as he said it made her suddenly feel as if it were true, as if
she had never been utterly unhappy. Yet she had never been really happy.
Africa had taught her that.

"Perhaps not," she answered. "But--some day--"

She stopped.

"Yes, Madame?"

"Could one stay long in such a world as this and not be either intensely
happy or intensely unhappy? I don't feel as if it would be possible.
Fierceness and fire beat upon one day after day and--one must learn to
feel here."

As she spoke a sensation of doubt, almost of apprehension, came to her.
She was overtaken by a terror of the desert. For a moment it