"Certainly!" she agreed. "Slaves are no longer burned for insubordination, because masters have grown too wise to burn money! But they have some laws they use now instead of the torch and the whip of those old crude days. From their book of laws they read the commandment: _'Go you out then, and of the heathen about you, buy bondmen and bondmaids that they be servants of your household;'_ and again it is commanded: _'Servants be obedient unto your masters!'_ The torch is no longer needed when those fettered souls are taught God has decreed their servitude. God has cursed them before they were born, and under that curse they must bend forever!" "You doubt even the religion of my people?" he demanded. "Yes!" "You doubt the divinity of those laws?" "Yes!" "Judithe!" "Yes!" she repeated, a certain dauntless courage in her voice and bearing. She was no longer the girl he had loved and married; she was a strange, wild, beautiful creature, whose tones he seemed to hear for the first time. "A thousand times--yes! I doubt any law and every law shackling liberty of thought and freedom of people! And the poison of that accursed system has crept into your own blood until, even to me, you pretend, and deny the infamy that exists today, and of which you are aware!" "Infamy! How dare you use that word?" and his eyes flamed with anger at the accusation, but she raised her hand, and spoke more quietly. "You remember the story you heard here today--the story of your guest and guardian, who sold the white child of his own brother? and the day when that was done is not so long past! It is so close that the child is now only a girl of twenty-three, the girl who was educated by her father's brother that she might prove a more desirable addition to your bondslaves!" "God in heaven!" he muttered, as he drew back and stared at her. "Your knowledge of those things, of the girl's age, which _I_ did not know! Where have you gained it all? When you heard so much you must know I was not aware of the purchase of the girl, but that does not matter now. Answer my questions! Your words, your manner; what do they mean? What has inspired this fury in you? Answer--I command you!" _"'Servants, be obedient unto your masters!'"_ she quoted, with a strange smile. "My words oppress you, possibly, because so many women are speaking through my lips, the women who for generations have thought and suffered and been doomed to silence, to bear the children of men they hated; to have the most sacred thing of life, mother-love, desecrated, according to the temper of their masters; to dread bringing into the world even the children of love, lest, whether white or black, they prove cattle for the slave market!" "Judithe!" He caught her hand as though to force silence on her by the strength of his own horror and protest. She closed her eyes for an instant as he touched her, and then drew away to leave a greater space between them, as she said: