For a little while Rhoda sat gazing at those closing lines, and then, with a sigh, she prepared to write her answer. She made several beginnings that did not suit her and tossed the pages to one side. “Dear Friend Jeff,” she finally wrote. “Concerning what you say about my doing things that are contrary to law, I must tell you that when men make laws that outrage every sense of right and justice in my own heart then I think that to disobey them is the only right and honorable course. The law of God is higher than the law of man. The law of God commands us to help the needy, to succor the oppressed, to aid the wayfarer, to deal justly by all men. That is what I have been doing and what I shall continue to do, although I break a whole houseful of man’s unjust and wicked laws.” She worked on through his letter, seriously answering an argument here, gaily deriding a point there, now displaying a hint of tenderness in some inquiry concerning his welfare, and again replying with vivacious but evasive sallies to personal remarks in which the lover seemed to overbalance the friend, until at last she came to the closing page. Then she laid down her pen and read it over again, realizing fully the enthusiasm, ambition and youthful energy which stirred and fed his devotion to this ideal of his section, and feeling also to the depths of her soul how completely it parted them. Her lips were trembling and her eyes dim with tears as she took up her pen again. “I will not deny,” she wrote, “that the picture you draw of a South in which men and women would make the highest and finest kind of civilization, is very attractive to me. Or, rather, it would be if your beautiful social order were not rooted in the hideous slime of slavery. I cannot believe that it would endure, or that it would be anything but a curse to the world as long as beneath it were the groans, the chains, the unpaid toil and misery of so many thousands of other men and women unfortunate enough to have been born with black skins. It will never be possible for you to claim me as long as you are a part of such a system. But I hope you will always remember me as your truest friend, Rhoda Adeline Ware.” She always signed her name thus in her letters to him, although she never used her middle name elsewhere, because it was a token of their mothers’ friendship and so it seemed to her to belong specially to their intercourse and to give to it a shy little fragrance of exclusion, of separateness from everything else.