s the first
to speak: "He should have acknowledged her."

"Yes," they all echoed, "he should have acknowledged her."

"My friends and companions," responded Mr. Ryder, "I thank you, one and
all. It is the answer I expected, for I knew your hearts."

He turned and walked toward the closed door of an adjoining room, while
every eye followed him in wondering curiosity. He came back in a moment,
leading by the hand his visitor of the afternoon, who stood startled and
trembling at the sudden plunge into this scene of brilliant gayety. She
was neatly dressed in gray, and wore the white cap of an elderly woman.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "this is the woman, and I am the man,
whose story I have told you. Permit me to introduce to you the wife of
my youth."

THE BOUQUET by Charles W. Chesnutt

Mary Myrover's friends were somewhat surprised when she began to teach
a colored school. Miss Myrover's friends are mentioned here, because
nowhere more than in a Southern town is public opinion a force which
cannot be lightly contravened. Public opinion, however, did not oppose
Miss Myrover's teaching colored children; in fact, all the colored
public schools in town--and there were several--were taught by white
teachers, and had been so taught since the state had undertaken to
provide free public instruction for all children within its boundaries.
Previous to that time there had been a Freedman's Bureau school and a
Presbyterian missionary school, but these had been withdrawn when the
need for them became less pressing. The colored people of the town had
been for some time agitating their right to teach their own schools, but
as yet the claim had not been conceded.

The reason Miss Myrover's course created some surprise was not,
therefore, the fact that a Southern white woman should teach a colored
school; it lay in the fact that up to this time no woman of just her
quality had taken up such work. Most of the teachers of colored schools
were not of those who had constituted the aristocracy of the old regime;
they might be said rather to represent the new order of things, in which
labor was in time to become honorable, and men were, after a somewhat
longer time, to depend, for their place in society, upon themselves
rather than upon their ancestors. But Mary Myrover belonged to one
of the proudest of the old families. Her ancestors had been people of
distinction in Virginia before a collateral branch of the main stock