"I'm afraid I'm a coward, too. She might have thought me interfering."

"She might not have understood," he murmured.

"It was clinging to her dress when she walked away down the platform," I
went on. "I dare say you noticed it then?"

"Not as you did. I wish I had noticed it more," was his answer. "Poor
little White One!"

That led us into our talk about the White People. He said he did not
think he was exactly an observant person in some respects. Remembering
his books, which seemed to me the work of a man who saw and understood
everything in the world, I could not comprehend his thinking that, and
I told him so. But he replied that what I had said about my White People
made him feel that he must be abstracted sometimes and miss things. He
did not remember having noticed the rare fairness I had seen. He smiled
as he said it, because, of course, it was only a little thing--that he
had not seen that some people were so much fairer than others.

"But it has not been a little thing to you, evidently. That is why I
am even rather curious about it," he explained. "It is a difference
definite enough to make you speak almost as if they were of a different
race from ours."

I sat silent a few seconds, thinking it over. Suddenly I realized what I
had never realized before.

"Do you know," I said, as slowly as he himself had spoken, "I did not
know that was true until you put it into words. I am so used to thinking