"Do you need me for anything, ma'am?" asked the young nurse, who had
stood before Mrs. Carteret, giving Mammy Jane a mere passing glance, and
listening impassively to her harangue. The nurse belonged to the
younger generation of colored people. She had graduated from the mission
school, and had received some instruction in Dr. Miller's class for
nurses. Standing, like most young people of her race, on the border line
between two irreconcilable states of life, she had neither the
picturesqueness of the slave, nor the unconscious dignity of those of
whom freedom has been the immemorial birthright; she was in what might
be called the chip-on-the-shoulder stage, through which races as well as
individuals must pass in climbing the ladder of life,--not an
interesting, at least not an agreeable stage, but an inevitable one, and
for that reason entitled to a paragraph in a story of Southern life,
which, with its as yet imperfect blending of old with new, of race with
race, of slavery with freedom, is like no other life under the sun.

Had this old woman, who had no authority over her, been a little more
polite, or a little less offensive, the nurse might have returned her a
pleasant answer. These old-time negroes, she said to herself, made her
sick with their slavering over the white folks, who, she supposed,
favored them and made much of them because they had once belonged to
them,--much the same reason why they fondled their cats and dogs. For
her own part, they gave her nothing but her wages, and small wages at
that, and she owed them nothing more than equivalent service. It was
purely a matter of business; she sold her time for their money. There
was no question of love between them.

Receiving a negative answer from Mrs. Carteret, she left the room
without a word, ignoring Mammy Jane completely, and leaving that
venerable relic of ante-bellum times gasping in helpless astonishment.