"RUTH, I am surprised at you! What did you mean by publishing that affidavit?" asked Stover the next morning after her affidavit appeared in the paper. "I meant just what my statement said," she replied.
"Didn't you know that you were doing a very wrong thing?"
"I just did it for fun. I did not think that it might injure the Ku Klux Klan."
"I don't care how much it injured the Ku Klux Klan; it deserves all the criticism it gets. What I dislike about it is that it causes comment about one of my employees and subjects my friend Springer to ridicule."
"Oh," she said, laughing, "I'm not shedding any tears over Springer. He should be a little more accurate in his reports. If he had reported the incident accurately and without prejudice he would not have been embarrassed by the exposure."
"Don't let anything like that happen again around here."
"I promise you I'll not."
Rastus tried to avoid Ruth. Next to Springer he was the worst beat man in town. When he saw Ruth enter one door of the president's office he would go out the other door. If he was in the banking room near the part of the room where she entered he immediately had business over on the other side of the room. It was almost noon when she met him face to face in one of the doors. "How are you, Rastus?" she said and then added, "Haven't been visited by any more Kluxers, have you?"
"No'em, I ain't. You all thought you had a good joke on me, but I ain't sech an ignoranimus as what you all might think. I spicioned all the time that it was you, Miss Babcock."
"If you suspected all the time that it was I, why did you become so frightened?"
"Me sca'ed! Well, I guess not. When you all stepped out from behind that elevator I says to myself that's Miss Babcock tryin' to play a joke on me and I says I'll have to hep her to have a little fun, so I jest 'tended like I'se sca'ed, jest to please you, Miss Ruth."
"Is that so, Rastus?"
"'Deed, it is. I'se a good spo't, I is."
"I thank you very much for the pleasure afforded me," she said, laughing.
"Yas, 'em, you's welcome, but I ain't gwine to give you sech pleasure no mo'."
"That's all right, Rastus. I consider that you have made your full contribution."
It was the middle of the afternoon. Ruth had not been busy for a half-hour. She had been reading a novel. It was a story of a girl who was about to marry a man who was in every respect a cultured gentleman—intelligent and refined in thought, dignified in manner, and of magnetic personality. A few weeks before the date set for the wedding the girl received a shock. She was informed that the man whom she was about to marry was one-sixteenth negro. She was furious and could scarcely restrain her hands from clutching the throat of her informant. "It's a lie, it's a lie!" she shouted. She was sure that the story had been invented by a jealous rival who wished to torment her. The next time she was with her lover she could not but think of this. She thought that she saw a slight olive tint to the skin, that there were dark circles at the base of his finger nails and that his nose was slightly flat and nostrils a little broad. Surely she imagined these things. She continued to worry until the man persuaded her to tell him the cause of her distress. The man admitted that it was the truth and offered to release her from the engagement. The author then shows a great conflict in the mind of the girl between social standards and love. In the end love triumphed and the girl married the man with the strain of colored blood in his veins.
When Ruth reached this point in the story she threw the book violently on the floor and exclaimed, "Rot, rot, that makes me sick!"
"That's treating the book rough." She turned and saw Pearl Gardner, one of the bookkeepers, standing in the door.
"Come in, Pearl, and have a chair."
"I wasn't busy and thought I would come in and see what you were doing. I arrived just in time to see the demonstration. I didn't know that you ever struck fire like that, ha, ha, ha."
"Now, you quit laughing at me. I got so disgusted at that story."
"What was it?"
"A girl was in love with a man, and just before their marriage she learned that he was part negro."
"Did she give him up?"
"No, that's the disgusting part of it. She married him."
"He must have been pretty white if she didn't know it."
"He was only a sixteenth negro."
"I don't blame her then if she loved him."
"What! You don't mean to say that you would have had her marry a man with negro blood in his veins, do you?"
"Why not, if she loved him? Isn't love the greatest thing in the world?"
"Yes, love that is rightly directed, is the greatest thing in the world; but love that violates the great racial instincts, that runs counter to the experience of mankind, that does violence to the highest social standards—is love run wild and does not lead to the greatest good."
"I don't see that it would do any harm if the man was so white that the girl did not know it when she fell in love with him."
"It would violate the racial instincts within her as well as the social standards of the race. The white race, even if............