"Please do not
say any more, Professor Parkhill. I--I fear that I am very human, after
all. Come, it is time that we were returning to the house."
All through the remaining hours of that afternoon and evening Kitty was
disturbed and troubled. At times she wanted to laugh at the professor's
ridiculous proposal; and again, her cheeks burned with anger; and she
could have cried in her shame and humiliation. And with it all her mind
was distraught by the persistent question: Was not the professor's
conception of an ideal mating the legitimate and logical conclusion of
those very advanced ideas of culture which he represented, and which she
had so much admired? If she sincerely believed the life represented by
the professor and his kind so superior--so far above the life
represented by Phil Acton--why should she not feel honored instead of
being so humiliated and shamed by the professor's--she could not call it
love? If the life which Phil had asked her to share was so low in the
scale of civilization; if it were so far beneath the intellectual and
spiritual ideals which she had formed, why did she feel so honored by
the strong man's love? Why had she not felt humiliated and ashamed that
Phil should want her to mate with him? Could it be, she asked herself
again and again, that there was something, after all, superior to that
culture which she had so truly thought stood for the highest ideals of
the race? Could it be that, in the land of Granite Mountain, there was
something, after all, that was as superior to the things she had been
taught as Granite Mountain itself was superior in its primeval strength
and enduring grandeur to the man-made buildings of her school?
It was not strange that Kitty's troubled thoughts should turn to Helen
Manning.
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