er's defection, her sympathies, broadened by culture and still more
by her recent emotional experience, did not shrink, as would have been
the case with a more selfish soul, to the mere limits of her personal
sorrow, great as this seemed at the moment. She had learned to love,
and when the love of one man failed her, she turned to humanity, as a
stream obstructed in its course overflows the adjacent country. Her
early training had not directed her thoughts to the darker people with
whose fate her own was bound up so closely, but rather away from them.
She had been taught to despise them because they were not so white as
she was, and had been slaves while she was free. Her life in her
brother's home, by removing her from immediate contact with them, had
given her a different point of view,--one which emphasized their
shortcomings, and thereby made vastly clearer to her the gulf that
separated them from the new world in which she lived; so that when
misfortune threw her back upon them, the reaction brought her nearer
than before. Where once she had seemed able to escape from them, they
were now, it appeared, her inalienable race. Thus doubly equipped, she
was able to view them at once with the mental eye of an outsider and
the sympathy of a sister: she could see their faults, and judge them
charitably; she knew and appreciated their good qualities. With her
quickened intelligence she could perceive how great was their need and
how small their opportunity; and with this illumination came the desire
to contribute to their help. She had not the breadth or culture to see
in all its ramifications the great problem which still puzzles
statesmen and philosophers; but she was conscious of the wish, and of
the power, in a small way, to do something for the advancement of those
who had just set their feet upon the ladder of progress.

This new-born desire to be of service to her rediscovered people was
not long without an opportunity for expression. Yet the Fates willed
that her future should be but another link in a connected chain: she
was to be as powerless to put aside her recent past as she had been to
escape from the influence of her earlier life. There are sordid souls
that eat and drink and breed and die, and imagine they have lived. But
Rena's life since her great awakening had been that of the emotions,
and her temperament made of it a continuous life. Her successive
states of consciousness were not detachable, b