Every day now more and more
Melanctha would let out to Jeff her real, strong feeling.
One day there had been much joy between them, more than they ever yet
had had with their new feeling. All the day they had lost themselves
in warm wandering. Now they were lying there and resting, with a
green, bright, light-flecked world around them.
What was it that now really happened to them? What was it that
Melanctha did, that made everything get all ugly for them? What was it
that Melanctha felt then, that made Jeff remember all the feeling he
had had in him when Jane Harden told him how Melanctha had learned
to be so very understanding? Jeff did not know how it was that it had
happened to him. It was all green, and warm, and very lovely to him,
and now Melanctha somehow had made it all so ugly for him. What was it
Melanctha was now doing with him? What was it he used to be thinking
was the right way for him and all the colored people to be always
trying to make it right, the way they should be always living? Why was
Melanctha Herbert now all so ugly for him?
Melanctha Herbert somehow had made him feel deeply just then, what
very more it was that she wanted from him. Jeff Campbell now felt
in him what everybody always had needed to make them really
understanding, to him. Jeff felt a strong disgust inside him; not for
Melanctha herself, to him, not for himself really, in him, not for
what it was that everybody wanted, in them; he only had disgust
because he never could know really in him, what it was he wanted, to
be really right in understanding, for him, he only had disgust because
he never could know really what it was really right to him to be
always doing, in the things he had before believed in, the things he
before had believed in for himself and for all the colored people, the
living regular, and the never wanting to be always having new things,
just to keep on, always being in excitements.
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