’Your time is all barred,’ continued Miss Durham, ’and the music of your life must be in common time. No elasticity, no initiative, all is barred and measured. Tell me something about yourself.’
’I!’ This was a daring question to address to one so reserved as Philip. ’I have had nothing occur in my life that could interest you.’
’Because it has been spent in a cage. I know it has. I can see the gaol-look in your face, in your back, in the way you wear your hair, in your coat, in your every action, and look, and tone of voice.’
’It is true. But you were not made to be a gaol-bird. No one is; only some get caught early and are put behind bars, and see the world, and know it, only through bars; the wind blows in on them only between bars, and the sun is cut and chopped up to them by bars and cross-bars, and all they know of the herbs and flowers are the scraps of chickweed and plantain, drooping and dying, that are suspended to their cage bars for them to peck at. I know exactly what they come to look like who have been encaged all their lives; they get bald on the poll and stiff in their movements, and set in their back, and dull of eye, and narrow of mind.’
’You—have you not been a cage-bird?’ asked Philip with some animation.
’Oh no, not I. I have kept outside the bars. I have been too fond of my liberty to venture behind them.’
’What do you mean by bars?’ asked Philip, with some gravity in his tone.
’Bars? There are bars of all sorts—social, religious, conventional—but there! I shock you; you have lived so long behind them, that you think the bars form the circumference of the world, and that existence is impossible, or improper outside of them.’
’Beyond some none are at liberty to step. They are essential.’
’I am not talking of the natural, but of the artificial restraints which cramp life. Have you any Bohemian blood in you?’
’Wild blood. I have. I confess it. A drop, a little drop, of fiery African blood. You in England have your class distinctions, but they are nothing beside our American separations between white and black. With you a blot on the escutcheon by a _mésalliance_ is nothing; with us it is ineradicable. There is a bar sinister cast over my shield and shutting me out from the esteem of and association with those whose blood is pure. Pure! It may be muddied with the mixture of villainous blood enough—of swindlers and renegades from justice, but that counts nothing. One little drop, an eighth part of a drop, damns me. I do not care. I thank that spot of taint. It has liberated me from conventional bonds, and I can live as I like, and see the sun eye to eye without intervening bars.’