but a perfectly pardonable and
proper exaggeration in Aunt Charlotte's estimation. At home she might
make herself a common scold, might be pestiferously officious and more
than pestiferously noisy. Abroad her worshipful pride in, and her
affection for, the pair she had reared shone through her old black face
as though a lamp of many candle power burned within her. She might chide
them at will, and she did, holding this to be her prerogative and her
right, but whosoever spoke slightingly of either of them in her
presence, be the speaker black or white, had Aunt Charlotte to fight
right there on the spot; she was as ready with her fists and her teeth
to assert the right of her white wards to immunity from criticism as
she was with her tongue lashings.

These things were all taken into consideration when Emmy Lou and Mildred
came that night to balance the account for and against the old woman--so
many, many deeds of thoughtfulness, of kindness, of tenderness on the
credit side; so many flagrant faults, so many shortcomings of temper and
behaviour on the debit page. The last caller had gone. Aunt Sharley,
after making the rounds of the house to see to door boltings and window
latchings, had hobbled upstairs to her own sleeping quarters over the
kitchen wing, and in the elder sister's room, with the lights turned
low, the two of them sat in their nightgowns on the side of Emmy Lou's
bed and tried the case of Spinster Charlotte Helm, coloured, in the
scales of their own youthful judgments. Without exactly being able to
express the situation in words, both realised that a condition which
verged upon the intolerable was fast approaching its climax.

Along with the impatience of youth and the thought of many grievances
they had within them a natural instinct for fairness; a legacy perhaps
from a father who had been just and a mother who had been mercifully
kind and gentle. First one would play the part of devil's advocate, the
while the other defended the accused, and then at the remembrance of
some one of a long record of things done or said by Aunt Sharley those
attitudes would be reversed.

There were times when both condemned the defendant, their hair braids
bobbing in emphasis of the intensity of their feelings; times when
together they conjured up recollections of the everlasting debt that
they owed her for her manifold goodnesses, her countless sacrifices on
behalf of them. The average Northerner, of whatsoever social s