ith them but he was out for supper somewhere
or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more
than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.

The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in
like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney
about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not
been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look
at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the
red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances' type dread red
haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did
know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as
her own property to be protected against all comers.

All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful
and armed.

Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney's dispraise of her, was a most
formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the
women of whom other women say, "Well, I don't know what he sees in her,
I'm sure."

A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full
curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the
world and the flesh--with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy
blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.

"Well, I'll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon the
darkie babies won't be any the worse for a _creche_ and maybe not very
much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good
manners and respect for their betters into their heads I'd give you forty.
I'm sure I don't know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to,
one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of
impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery
leery what-d'-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces
s'nough to raise Cain in any one's heart."

"I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip is
the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what
we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists."

"Don't call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn't
make 'em. All the same I don't believe in whipping and never did. It's the
whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like
Christians sl