“Oh, you’re very soft-spoken, but you’re that obstinate! What do you want with the States? You’re so mighty pitiful of the poor--almost a socialist, as one may say. Well, I can tell you there’s harder lines there between rich and poor than there is in these old countries, and more hatred too. There aren’t nowhere,” continued Margaret Massarene, her pale face growing warm, “where the luxury’s more overdone, and the selfishness crueller, and the spending of money wickeder, than in the States. Nowhere on earth where the black man is loathed and the poor white is scorned as they are in that canting ‘free’ country!” Katherine sighed. “So I have always understood. But it only makes it a greater duty.” “What a greater duty?” Katherine hesitated. “To go there. To see for oneself. To try and restore what one can.” “Duty never lies at home, my dear, we know,” said Mrs. Massarene with sarcastic acerbity. “I suppose you’ll write to me once a month; and if anything happens to me while you’re away, you’ll give orders as they’ll lay me by your poor dear father, whom you’re ashamed on.” Her daughter felt that her path of duty, whether at home or abroad, was one which it was not easy to discern in the gloaming of a finite humanity, through the tangled brush-wood of conflicting demands and principles. “Won’t you, can’t you understand, mother?” she said, with a wistful supplication in her voice. “No,” replied her mother sternly. “I could hev understood if you’d held your head high, and married high, and had a lot of nice little children; but a freak as will make you the laughing-stock of all the respectable newspapers on this side and the other, I don’t understand and don’t want to understand; and ’tis an insult to poor William in his grave.” “I’m not speaking for myself, my dear,” she added; “it’s very good of you not to hev put me in the workhouse.” Katherine felt that, though duty may be bracing and fortifying, it strongly resembles a cold salt bath when the thermometer is below zero.