ended, as well she might,
these schools.

"You must have a high standard," she said. "You cannot have good lower
schools without good higher schools. And these colleges, which you think
above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the
whole mass. You cannot do anything until you educate teachers."

"So I have always heard," replied the incorrigible. "I have always been
a philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to
be again when I go back."

Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies
devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without
any concern for the moral problems. They all declared that they liked
the negro. But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any
amount of badgering. She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the
consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of
doing something that was demanded by her opportunity. It is so difficult
to analyze motives, and in Margaret's case so hard to define the change
that had taken place in her. That her heart was not enlisted in this
affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew.
Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through
her husband's eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent
with much good feeling and easy-going charity. She also felt the
necessity--a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen's--of
making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures. Gradually she was
learning to play her husband's game in life, and to see no harm in
it. What, then, is this thing we call conscience? Is it made of
India-rubber? I once knew a clever Southern woman, who said that New
England women seemed to her all conscience--Southern women all soul and
impulse. If it were possible to generalize in this way, we might say
that Carmen had neither conscience nor soul, simply very clever reason.
Uncle Jerry had no more conscience than Carmen, but he had a great deal
of natural affection. Henderson, with an abundance of good-nature, was
simply a man of his time, troubled with no scruples that stood in the
way of his success. Margaret, with a finer nature than either of them,
stifling her scruples in an atmosphere of worldly-mindedness, was likely
to go further than either of them. Even such a worldling as Carmen
understood this. "I do things," she said to Mrs. Laflamme--she made
anyb