mother had lived she'd never in this world a-been allowed to run wild as
a boy, a-getting tanned as black as a--a, darky."

Martha was a most devoted soul who had come from the North with her
mistress when that lady left her New England home to journey to Maryland
as Commander Stewart's bride. He was only a junior lieutenant then, but
that was nearly eighteen years before this story opens. She had not seen
many colored people while living in the Massachusetts town in which she
had been born and her experience with them was limited to the very few
who, after the Civil War, had drifted into it. Of the true Southern
negro, especially those of the ante-bellum type, she had not the
faintest conception. It had all been a revelation to her. The devotion
of the house servants to their "white folks," to whom so many had
remained faithful even after liberation, was a never-ending source of
wonder to the good soul. Nor could she understand why those old family
retainers stigmatized the younger generations as "shiftless, no-account,
new-issue niggers." That there could be marked social distinctions among
these colored people never occurred to her.

That generations of them had been carefully trained by master and
mistress during the days of slavery, and that the younger generations
had had no training whatever, was quite beyond Martha's grasp. Colored
people were COLORED PEOPLE, and that ended it.

But as the years passed, Martha learned many things. She had her own
neatly-appointed little dining-room in her own well-ordered little wing
of the great, rambling colonial house which Peggy Stewart called home, a
house which could have told a wonderful history of one hundred eighty or
more years. We will tell it later on. We have left Peggy too long
perched upon her snake-fence with Shashai and Tzaritza.