I have found that when one member of a family of mixed light and dark blood is of the distinctly Iberian type, this one will almost invariably take a peculiar and in some ways a superior position in the circle. The woman especially exhibits a liveliness, humour, and variety rare indeed among persons born in the peasant class. She entertains the visitor, or takes the leading part, and her slow-witted sisters { 240} regard her with a kind of puzzled admiration. They are sisters, yet unrelated: their very blood differs in specific gravity, and their bodily differences correspond to a mental and spiritual unlikeness. In my intercourse with people in the southern counties I have sometimes been reminded of Huxley and his account of his parents contained in a private letter to Havelock Ellis. His father, he said, was a fresh-coloured, grey-eyed Warwickshire man. "My mother came of Wiltshire people. Except for being somewhat taller than the average type, she was a typical example of the Iberian variety--dark, thin, rapid in all her ways, and with the most piercing black eyes I have seen in anybody's head. Mentally and physically (except in the matter of the beautiful eyes) I am a piece of my mother, and except for my stature ... I should do very well for a 'black Celt'--supposed to be the worst variety of that type."
The contrast between persons of this type and Saxon or blonde has often seemed to me greatest in childhood, since the blonde at that period, even in Hampshire, is apt to be a delicate pink and white whereas the individual of strongly-marked Iberian character is very dark from birth. I will, to conclude this perhaps imprudent chapter, give an instance in point.
Walking one day through the small rustic village of Martyr Worthy, near Winchester, I saw a little girl of nine or ten sitting on the grass at the side of the wide green roadway in the middle of the village engaged in binding flowers round her hat. She was { 241} slim, and had a thin oval face, dark in colour as any dark Spanish child, or any French child in the "black provinces"; and she had, too, the soft melancholy black eye which is the chief beauty of the Spanish, and her loose hair was intensely black. Even here where dark eyes and dark hair are so common, her darkness was wonderful by contrast with a second little girl of round, chubby, rosy face, pale-yellowish hair, and wide-open blue surprised eyes, who stood by her side watching her at her task. The flowers were lying in a heap at her side; she had wound a long slender spray of traveller's joy round her brown straw hat, and was now weaving in lychnis and veronica, with other small red and blue blossoms, to improve her garland. I found to my surprise on questioning her that she knew the names of the flowers she had collected. An English village child, but in that Spanish darkness and beauty, and in her grace and her pretty occupation, how very un-English she seemed!