nd to look up to him; I don't want to
begin now by disobeying him--by going counter to his wishes. And I can
understand his position too. To him she's just an unreasonable,
meddlesome, officious, contrary old negro woman who would insist on
running the household of which he should be the head. She would too.

"It isn't that he feels unkindly toward her--he's too good and too
generous for that. Why, it was Harvey who suggested that wages should go
on just the same after she leaves us--he has even offered to double
them if it will make her any better satisfied with the move. I'm sure,
though, it can't be the question of money that figures with her. She
never tells anyone about her own private affairs, but after all these
years she must have a nice little sum saved up. I can't remember when
she spent anything on herself--she was always so thrifty about money. At
least she was careful about our expenditures, and of course she must
have been about her own. So it can't be that. Harvey puts it down to
plain stubbornness. He says after the first wrench of the separation is
over she ought to be happier, when she's taking things easy in her own
little house, than she is now, trying to do all the work in our house.
He says he wants several servants in our home--a butler, and a maid to
wait on me and Mildred, and a housemaid and a cook. He says we can't
have them if we keep Aunt Sharley. And we can't, either--she'd drive
them off the place. No darky could get along with her a week. Oh, I just
don't know what to do!"

"And whut does Aunt Sharley say?" asked the Judge.

"I told you. Sometimes she says she won't go and sometimes she says she
can't go. But she won't tell why she can't--just keeps on declaring up
and down that she can't. She makes a different excuse or she gives a
different reason every morning; she seems to spend her nights thinking
them up. Sometimes I think she is keeping something back from me--that
she isn't telling me the real cause for her refusal to accept the
situation and make the best of it. You know how secretive our coloured
people can be sometimes."

"All the time, you mean," amended the old man. "Northerners never seem
to be able to git it through their heads that a darky kin be
loud-mouthed and close-mouthed at the same time. Now you take that black
boy Jeff of mine. Jeff knows more about me--my habits, my likes and my
dislikes, my private business and my private thoughts and all--than I
know myself.