I think the negro question has a hundred. But there is only one
side to Henderson Hall. It is a noble institution. I like to think about
it, and Uncle Caesar Hollowell crossing the Rubicon in his theological
seminary. It is all so beautiful!"

"You are a bad child," said Margaret. "We should have left you at home."

"No, not bad, dear; only confused with such a lot of good deeds in a
naughty world."

That this junketing party was deeply interested in the cause of education
for whites or blacks, no one would have gathered from the conversation.
Margaret felt that Carmen had exactly hit the motives of this sort of
philanthropy, and she was both amused and provoked by the girl's mockery.
By force of old habit she defended, as well she might, these schools.

"You must have a high standard," she said. "You cannot have good lower
schools without good higher schools. And these colleges, which you think
above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the
whole mass. You cannot do anything until you educate teachers."

"So I have always heard," replied the incorrigible. "I have always been a
philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to be
again when I go back."

Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies
devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without
any concern for the moral problems. They all declared that they liked the
negro. But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any amount
of badgering. She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the
consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of
doing something that was demanded by her opportunity. It is so difficult
to analyze motives, and in Margaret's case so hard to define the change
that had taken place in her. That her heart was not enlisted in this
affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew.
Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through
her husband's eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent
with much good feeling and easy-going charity. She also felt the
necessity--a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen's--of
making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures. Gradually she was
learning to play her husband's game in life, and to see no harm in it.
What, then, is this thing we call conscience? Is it made of India-rubber?
I once knew a clever Southern woman, wh