The two exceptions were Laurastine and Enameline Flack. Laurastine and Enameline belonged to the one colored family in town, and they had always attended the public school and had always been well treated by the other children. But when Sallie Lou cast her golden charm over the room, things changed. Sallie Lou didn’t understand why they should be there at all, and she surely didn’t intend to tolerate them as her social equals. Led by the irresistible charm of Sallie Lou, vying with each other to stand in her graces, the other children began to ignore the two little colored girls, or openly to laugh at them and pointedly to leave them out of their games. Miss Stone, the teacher, being a northern woman and a believer in literal democracy, thought this a very bad state of things indeed. The two little girls were well behaved, wistful, little creatures, whose tears at the new turn of things went straight to Miss Stone’s big heart. She knew that the remedy must come in some way through Sallie Lou, who had caused the havoc; for there was no possible way to supplant her dominant influence, nor was such a thing desirable except for this one cause. Sallie Lou had wakened the room to a new interest in many things, and in everything except the treatment of the little “niggers” she was sweetness and docility itself. Could Sallie Lou be converted? Miss Stone tried it, with doubt in her heart; she knew what prejudice is. She invited Sallie Lou to her house for supper one Friday night, and after supper they sat by the fire and had a long talk about it. Miss Stone presented the pathetic cases of Laurastine and Enameline as touchingly as she could, but Sallie Lou merely smiled divinely and told her, most sweetly, that of course she wanted to do what was right, but that it wasn’t right for “niggers” to mix socially with white people, and that the town should provide a separate school for them. She was firmly entrenched behind the prejudice of her rearing in a community which solved the problem this way. Miss Stone reluctantly retreated from the attack, but she did not give up. She went behind the prejudice to its support, behind the example to its example. She cultivated Sallie Lou’s mother, her father, her four charming brothers. The parents, finding few cultured people in the little town, welcomed the well-read teacher and were very cordial to her. When she had won their respect and liking, Miss Stone asked for a frank talk with them about the conditions in her room, and told them just how the irresistible Sallie Lou was leading all the other children in the fifth grade to snub the two little Flacks.