Then there was the fact of their color: it was a fact so insistent, so
fatal she almost said at times, that she could not escape it.
Theoretically she had always treated it with disdainful ease.

"What's the mere color of a human soul's skin," she had cried to a
Wellesley audience and the audience had applauded with enthusiasm. But
here in Alabama, brought closely and intimately in touch with these dark
skinned children, their color struck her at first with a sort of
terror--it seemed ominous and forbidding. She found herself shrinking
away and gripping herself lest they should perceive. She could not help
but think that in most other things they were as different from her as
in color. She groped for new ways to teach colored brains and marshal
colored thoughts and the result was puzzling both to teacher and
student. With the other teachers she had little commerce. They were in
no sense her sort of folk. Miss Smith represented the older New England
of her parents--honest, inscrutable, determined, with a conscience which
she worshipped, and utterly unselfish. She appealed to Miss Taylor's
ruddier and daintier vision but dimly and distantly as some memory of
the past. The other teachers were indistinct personalities, always very
busy and very tired, and talking "school-room" with their meals. Miss
Taylor was soon starving for human companionship, for the lighter
touches of life and some of its warmth and laughter. She wanted a glance
of the new books and periodicals and talk of great philanthropies and
reforms. She felt out of the world, shut in and mentally anæmic; great
as the "Negro Problem" might be as a world problem, it looked sordid and
small at close range. So for the hundredth time she was thinking today,
as she walked alone up the lane back of the barn, and then slowly down
through the bottoms. She paused a moment and nodded to the two boys at
work in a young cotton field.