Her guest stretched in comfort in the big chair, his handsome head
thrown back, his lighted pipe in his hand as he blew the smoke from
between his lips. He would have been greatly pleased if Kathleen had
chosen to tell of the moving pictures, but he saw at once that this was
not her mood.

"I wish I had been with you at both places," he said courteously, with a
little touch of formality that the Irish girl ridiculed and the southern
girl liked. "It must have been like going to the theater and seeing both
a comedy and a tragedy, only in that case they usually put the comedy
last."

"That may be what they do at the theater but it isn't what they do in
life."

Kathleen was ready to talk. She sat in her chair and told the story of
southern peonage and wrong.

Hertha, who had failed to listen at Cooper Union, was moved in spite of
herself at the tragic tale as it came from Kathleen's lips. It was the
same in all essentials, but vivified by a rare imagination and a
compelling sympathy. The Irishwoman became herself the thin, yellow,
starved mother dragging her steps from her unlovely home into the hot,
relentless fields.

"Have you ever seen anything like that?" William Applebaum asked of
Hertha when the story came to an end.

Hertha hesitated as she answered. "No, I don't think I have. I lived
much of the time in the city. I haven't known about such things." She
thought of Ellen as she spoke, and was sure, had she been there, she
could have talked intelligently about peonage and poverty among white
and black. She remembered that Ellen used to say the Negro never fell as
low as the lowest white. "Those are the folks," she added, "that we call
poor white trash."

Her friend flared up at her. "Yes, and why are they trash? Because you
treat them worse than slaves! You hold them in debt, steal from them
with every piece of bacon or cup of meal they buy from your store, work
their children when they should be at school or playing out under the
blue skies; and then you live in idleness and sneer at the trash that
done the work of the world for you."

"Miss Hertha doesn't sneer, and neither do I, Kitty, but I think you're
talking of an exceptional case. At any rate, as I have seen things in
the North and West, I've found that it was the fault of the man if he
didn't live decently in the world, and keep his woman that way, too. Why
didn't this woman's husband pay off his debt and go to another farm?"

"For the same reaso