“Your mother and I, Rhoda, have never discussed the question. Her father was a kindly man and treated his slaves well, and so the only conditions that she knew anything about were of slavery at its best. She had such a happy girlhood on her father’s plantation, where the slaves were all eager to do anything for her, that her memories of it are very pleasant. I’ve never wanted to disturb them, because it wouldn’t do any good and it might spoil the pleasure she takes in thinking about those days; and so I’ve never talked about it with her, although she knows, of course, what I think.” Rhoda threw him an admiring glance, which he, with his eyes averted in semi-embarrassment at having revealed a glimpse of his inner self to his offspring, did not see. “Mother has told us, Charlotte and me,” Rhoda went on thoughtfully, “so many things about her girlhood and her father’s plantation, and she has always been so pleased in recalling those days, that I couldn’t help wondering sometimes if anything could be wrong that made everybody as happy as they seemed to have been in her home. And Charlotte, you know, is quite convinced that slavery is all right.” “Oh, Charlotte!” Dr. Ware exclaimed in an amused tone. “She’s just a little fire-eater! But she doesn’t mean half she says.” “Sometimes she doesn’t, but she seems to be getting quite in earnest about it lately.” “Like all the rest of us, on both sides,” her father appended. “Mother says her father never sold a negro,” Rhoda went on, “and that his slaves were always contented and happy and that the same things were true on the other plantations where she visited.” Dr. Ware’s face darkened. “He didn’t, while he lived. But he left his affairs in such a tangle when he died that most of his slaves were sold to satisfy his debts. Your mother was ill then--it was about the time you were born--and I did not tell her, and as we were living in the North nobody else did, anything about that part of it. To this day she doesn’t know”--he was clipping off his words in a tone of impersonal resentment--“that her old mammy, of whom she was so fond, was sold to a trader who was buying for a cotton plantation in the South. When I found out about it I tried to have her traced, so as to buy her myself, bring her North and free her. But I finally found that she was dead and that her fate, though different, had been no better than Uncle Tom’s.” The girl drew back with an exclamation of horror, and her eyes filled. “Oh, father! That good, kind creature, who loved mother so much!” “Don’t ever tell your mother,” he cautioned. “It would do no good and it would make her unhappy. You see, Rhoda, how impossible it is for one man, no matter how good his intentions may be, to keep back the evil that is inherent in slavery. He can’t make his own affairs better than the system very long.”