ces me to it. As you may guess, Judge Priest, I am about to become a
mother myself. If my baby lives--and my baby is going to live--that
money will belong to my child should anything happen to me. I must think
of what lies ahead of me, not of what has gone before. My mother owns
the home where she lives; she will have her half of this sum of money;
she is, I believe, in good health; she is amply able to go on, as she
has in the past, adding to her income with her needle. So much for my
mother. As a mother myself it will be my duty, as I see it, to safeguard
the future of my own child, and I mean to do it, regardless of
everything else. That is all I have to say about it--that is, if I have
made myself sufficiently plain to you, Judge Priest."

"Madam," said he, and for once at least he dropped his lifelong
affectation of ungrammatical speech and reverted to that more stately
and proper English which he reserved for his judgments from the bench,
"you have indeed made your position so clear by what you have just said
that I feel there is nothing whatsoever to be added by either one of us.
Madam, I have the pleasure to bid you good night."

He clamped his floppy straw hat firmly down upon his head--a thing the
old judge in all his life never before had done in the presence of a
woman of his race--and he turned the broad of his back upon her; and if
a man whose natural gait was a waddle could be said to stride, then be
it stated that Judge Priest strode out of that room and out of that
house. Had he looked back before he reached the door he would have seen
that she sat in her chair, huddled in her silken garments, on her face a
half smile of tolerant contempt for his choler and in her eye a light
playing like winter sunlight on frozen water; would have seen that about
her there was no suggestion whatsoever that she was ruffled or upset or
in the least regretful of the course she had elected to follow. But
Judge Priest did not look back. He was too busy striding.

Perhaps it was the heat or perhaps it was inability long to maintain a
gait so forced, but the volunteer emissary ceased to stride long before
he had traversed the three-quarters of a mile--and yet, when one came to
think it over, a span as wide as a continent--which lay between the
restricted, not to say exclusive, head of Chickasaw Drive and the
shabby, not to say miscellaneous, foot of Yazoo Street. It was a very
wilted, very lag-footed, very droopy old gentlem