r work; to find out what
they knew, to classify them by their intelligence rather than by their
knowledge, for they were all lamentably ignorant. Some among them were
the children of parents who had been free before the war, and of these
some few could read and one or two could write. One paragon, who could
repeat the multiplication table, was immediately promoted to the
position of pupil teacher.

Miss Chandler took a liking to the tall girl who had come so far to sit
under her instruction. There was a fine, free air in her bearing, a
lightness in her step, a sparkle in her eye, that spoke of good
blood,--whether fused by nature in its own alembic, out of material
despised and spurned of men, or whether some obscure ancestral strain,
the teacher could not tell. The girl proved intelligent and learned
rapidly, indeed seemed almost feverishly anxious to learn. She was
quiet, and was, though utterly untrained, instinctively polite, and
profited from the first day by the example of her teacher's quiet
elegance. The teacher dressed in simple black. When Cicely came back to
school the second day, she had left off her glass beads and her red
ribbon, and had arranged her hair as nearly like the teacher's as her
skill and its quality would permit.

The teacher was touched by these efforts at imitation, and by the
intense devotion Cicely soon manifested toward her. It was not a
sycophantic, troublesome devotion, that made itself a burden to its
object. It found expression in little things done rather than in any
words the girl said. To the degree that the attraction was mutual,
Martha recognized in it a sort of freemasonry of temperament that drew
them together in spite of the differences between them. Martha felt
sometimes, in the vague way that one speculates about the impossible,
that if she were brown, and had been brought up in North Carolina, she
would be like Cicely; and that if Cicely's ancestors had come over in
the Mayflower, and Cicely had been reared on Beacon Street, in the
shadow of the State House dome, Cicely would have been very much like
herself.

Miss Chandler was lonely sometimes. Her duties kept her occupied all
day. On Sundays she taught a Bible class in the schoolroom.
Correspondence with bureau officials and friends at home furnished her
with additional occupation. At times, nevertheless, she felt a longing
for the company of women of her own race; but the white ladies of the
town did not call, even i