Charlotte surveyed herself critically in the glass once more and patted the fichu with approval. “It’s lovely, Rhoda, and I’m so glad you’re a Black Abolitionist! No good-looking young slaveholder would need to ask me more than once--that is, he wouldn’t need to if he knew it, but it’s more interesting to make them ask several times--didn’t you use to think so, mother? The more slaves he had the better I’d like him--and the more times I’d let him propose. Oh, la! How lovely it would be to have a dozen or so slaves ready to come the minute you call, and every time you look out of a window to see droves of them, all working for you! That would just suit us, wouldn’t it, Bully Brooks?” And she caught up the kitten from the floor in time to save the curtain, swaying in the breeze, from another attack. “It’s perfectly silly of you, Rhoda,” she went on, as she tilted out of the room, the kitten on her shoulder, “to care any more about Jeff Delavan’s having a lot of slaves than you would if they were so many horses. Isn’t it, Bully Brooks?” The kitten gave quick and loud response and Mrs. Ware, with a frown in her voice, called after her, “Charlotte!” But she heard in reply from down the hall only a merry laugh and the whistled strains of “Comin’ through the Rye.” “Charlotte is not sympathetic,” said her mother fondly, putting an arm around Rhoda and pressing her cheek to her daughter’s, “but her ideas are certainly correct. And any one will tell you so, dear, who has lived in the South and knows what slavery really is. You’ve no right, Rhoda, as I’ve already told you, to set yourself up in judgment on a subject you know nothing about, and against those who know all about it. Why can’t you trust your mother, honey?” She put her hands upon her daughter’s shoulders and looked up beseechingly into Rhoda’s troubled face. “I know all about slavery, dearie,” she went on, “for I lived in the heart of it until I was married, and I give you my word the niggers are far happier and better off under it than they would be if they were free. They don’t want freedom. And they are so grateful to their masters and mistresses and so fond of them! Why, dear, my old mammy loved me almost as much, I do believe, as my mother did!” Rhoda recalled what her father had told her of that “old mammy’s” fate and pressed her lips together in sudden fear lest, in spite of his injunction, she might tell what she knew. “I know, mother,” she said falteringly, “at your home it seems to have been as near right as it could be; but, mother, dear, they’re human beings, and I can’t make it seem right, no matter how much I think about it and try to see it as you do, that they should be bought and sold!” “That’s only because you don’t know much about niggers, dear child! They’re not really human beings, in the sense that we are. If you had grown up among them as I did you would understand that. Charlotte is quite right in saying they are no more to be considered than horses.”