"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 it desired to do so, could not absorb the negro race in the United States through intermarriage. There is an inevitable reversion to type. If you had a race seven-eighths white and one-eighth negro you would have a race that was essentially negro in its physical structure and racial tendencies." "Ruth, I believe you must be getting ready to become a lecturer on the race question. Of course, I don't believe intermarriage would be a good thing for the country, but I don't think we should try to keep the negro down. I heard my father say last night that one objection he had to the Ku Klux Klan is that one of its purposes is to oppress the negro."