he unwillingness of the better class of slaves to leave
their former owners--"

"Now you are going to quote a paragraph or so from your Gracious Era. As
if I hadn't read everything you ever wrote! You are a fearful humbug in
some ways, Rudolph."

"And you are a red-headed rattlepate, madam. But seriously, Patricia,
you who were reared in the North are strangely unwilling to concede that
we of the South are after all best qualified to deal with the Negro
Problem. We know the negro as you cannot ever know him."

"You! Oh, God ha' mercy on us!" mocked Patricia. "There wasn't any Negro
Problem hereabouts, you beautiful idiot, so long as there were any
negroes. Why, to-day there is hardly one full-blooded negro in
Lichfield. There are only a thousand or so of mulattoes who share the
blood of people like your Uncle Edward. And for the most part they take
after their white kin, unfortunately. And there you have the Lichfield
Negro Problem in a nutshell. It is a venerable one and fully set forth
in the Bible. You needn't attempt to argue with me, because you are a
ninnyhammer, and I am a second Nestor. The Holy Scriptures are perfectly
explicit as to what happens to the heads of the children and their teeth
too."

"I wish you wouldn't jest about such matters--"

"Because it isn't lady-like? But, Rudolph, you know perfectly well that
I am not a lady."

"My dear!" he cried, in horror that was real, "and what on earth have I
said even to suggest--"

"Oh, not a syllable; it isn't at all the sort of thing that your sort
_says_ ... And I am not your sort. I don't know that I altogether wish I
were. But _if_ I were, it would certainly make things easier," Patricia
added sharply.

"My dear--!" he again protested.

"Now, candidly, Rudolph"--relinquishing the game, she fell to shuffling
the cards--"just count up the number of times this month that my--oh,
well! I really don't know what to call it except my deplorable omission
in failing to be born a lady--has seemed to you to yank the very last
rag off the gooseberry-bush?"

He scoffed. "What nonsense! Although, of course, Patricia--"

She nodded, mischief in her brightly-colored tiny face. "Yes, that is
just your attitude, you beautiful idiot."

"--although, of course--now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have
occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and--er,
physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which--well! in
which you sometimes do speak o