ud doze nigga'
free, aind it?"

Frowenfeld pushed his hair hard back. He was in the stream now, and
might as well go through.

"I have heard that charge made, even by some Americans. I do not know.
But there is a slavery that no legislation can abolish,--the slavery of
caste. That, like all the slaveries on earth, is a double bondage. And
what a bondage it is which compels a community, in order to preserve its
established tyrannies, to walk behind the rest of the intelligent world!
What a bondage is that which incites a people to adopt a system of
social and civil distinctions, possessing all the enormities and none of
the advantages of those systems which Europe is learning to despise!
This system, moreover, is only kept up by a flourish of weapons. We have
here what you may call an armed aristocracy. The class over which these
instruments of main force are held is chosen for its servility,
ignorance, and cowardice; hence, indolence in the ruling class. When a
man's social or civil standing is not dependent on his knowing how to
read, he is not likely to become a scholar."

"Of coze," said Aurora, with a pensive respiration, "I thing id is doze
climade," and the apothecary stopped, as a man should who finds himself
unloading large philosophy in a little parlor.

"I thing, me, dey hought to pud doze quadroon' free?" It was Clotilde
who spoke, ending with the rising inflection to indicate the tentative
character of this daringly premature declaration.

Frowenfeld did not answer hastily.

"The quadroons," said he, "want a great deal more than mere free papers
can secure them. Emancipation before the law, though it may be a right
which man has no right to withhold, is to them little more than a
mockery until they achieve emancipation in the minds and good will of
the people--'the people,' did I say? I mean the ruling class." He
stopped again. One must inevitably feel a little silly, setting up
tenpins for ladies who are too polite, even if able, to bowl them down.

Aurora and the visitor began to speak simultaneously; both apologized,
and Aurora said:

"'Sieur Frowenfel', w'en I was a lill girl,"--and Frowenfeld knew that
he was going to hear the story of Palmyre. Clotilde moved, with the
obvious intention to mend the fire. Aurora asked, in French, why she did
not call the cook to do it, and Frowenfeld said, "Let me,"--threw on
some wood, and took a seat nearer Clotilde. Aurora had the floor.

CHAPTER XXV