men expressed. They inherited the shell and the intellect, the
aspirations and the possibilities of the gay young planters whose
tragic folly had called into being a race of outcasts with all their
own capacity for shame and suffering.

Betty went home and for twenty-four hours fought with the desire to
champion the cause of the negro and make him her life-work. But not
only did she abominate women with missions; she looked at the subject
upon each of its many sides and asked a number of indirect questions
of her cousin, Jack Emory. Sincere reflection brought with it the
conclusion that her energies in behalf of the negro would be
superfluous. The careless planters were dead; she could not harangue
their dust. The Southerners of the present generation despised and
feared the coloured race in its enfranchised state too actively to
have more to do with it than they could help; if it was a legal
offence for Whites and Blacks to marry, there was an equally stringent
social law which protected the coloured girl from the lust of the
white man. Therefore, as she could not undo the harm already done, and
as a crusade in behalf of the next generation would be meaningless,
not to say indelicate, she dismissed the "problem" from her mind. But
the image of those two sad and stately reflections of the old school
sank indelibly into her memory, and rose to their part in one of the
most momentous decisions of her life.




III