"I understood you to say you weren't."

"I said we were not handing 'it' down."

I didn't wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. "You must
excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union
beyond her. We haven't had so many advantages."

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours: the
tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes! The war had not prevented my
parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen
the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the
young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

"Miss La Heu," I said, "I could not tell you, you would not wish me to
tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel. But you will
let me say this: I have understood for a long while about your old
people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad."

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

"And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing
completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope
the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes."

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal
Street.

"Perhaps," I still continued, "you will hardly believe me when I say
that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant
even than that which Northern monuments raise in me."

"Why?"

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "Need you have asked that? The North won."

"You are quite dispassionate!" Her eyes were always toward the window.

"That's my 'sacred trust.'"

It made her look at me. "Yours?"

"Not yours--yet! It would be yours if you had won." I thought a slight
change came in her steady scrutiny. "And, Miss La Heu, it was awful
about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as
you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don't expect them to change,
but they mustn't expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to
whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them--here's the negro. We
can't kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it's like two men having
to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the
black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white.
And it will end so."

She was eager. "Slavery again, you think?"

"Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between
slavery and equality." And I ended with a q