and sing our songs?"

She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping
for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained
undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out
with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not
simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an
understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary--we could
agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality--but an
understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light
increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom
of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along.
This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never
let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu
didn't understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just
this moment become clear to myself.

"Many of us," I began, "who have watched the soiling touch of politics
make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated
to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world
to sing its songs and draw its pensions."

She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she
was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had
turned past heroism.

"But," I continued, "we haven't any Daughters of the Union banded
together and handing it down."

"It?" she echoed. "Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred
trust to you, don't invite us, please, to resemble you."

I waited for more, and a little more came.

"We consider Northerners foreigners, you know."

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now
knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out;
and I knew she didn't mean quite all that--didn't mean it every day, at
least--and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

"No, Miss La Heu; you don't consider Northerners, who understand you, to
be foreigners."

"We have never met any of that sort."

("Yes," I thought, "but you really want to. Didn't you say you hoped I
was one? Away down deep there's a cry of kinship in you; and that you
don't hear it, and that we don't hear it, has been as much our fault as
yours. I see that very well now, but I'm afraid to tell you so, yet.")

What I said was: "We're handing the 'sacred trust' down, I hope."