er. And I tell you," looking with wet
eyes back down the long aisle of the church to where the Bible lay on
the reading-desk, "I know what heaven's going to be like. It isn't going
to have any golden streets. Think how horrid and hard and glaring they'd
be! It will have spreading trees and flowers, lilies and asphodels and
green grass--yes, and white sand; and I engage you now to go out walking
with me the first Sunday."

The tears were in his eyes as well as hers. "I'll love to be there
waiting fer you, Sister," he answered.

She gripped him in her arms for a moment and then with a gulping sob
opened the door and went out into the street.

CHAPTER XXXI

"Keep out of the conflict!"

This admonition ran through Hertha's mind as she went to school Monday
morning. She saw herself standing at the little table in the restaurant
with the cynical old major looking at her kindly, admiringly. The
conflict to which he had alluded had been that of the working-class, but
his words might include all battle whether of labor or of race. If she
married Dick she would be out of the conflict, out of the eternal worry
of earning a living. But she would also be out of the conflict of race,
forever removed from the life that had been hers such a short time ago.
If she accepted the love of this young man from Georgia with his talk of
"black wenches" and "buck niggers," she accepted complete ostracism from
her past. And not only ostracism,--she had grown to realize that this
was likely whatever course she chose,--but the past that had meant so
much, that had helped to make her what she was, gentle-mannered, deft,
well-educated, this past she must see despised. Dick might forgive those
years but only if she would forget them. He would be ambitious for them
both, and she must blot from her mind everything that touched upon the
shocking disgrace, for so he would account it, of her world until eight
months ago.

Sophie Switsky was in the conflict still, battling with the oppression
that centered about her whirring machine. Kathleen was in it, demanding
sunshine and health for the many in poverty. But if Hertha Williams
married a Georgia cracker she left her conflict, turned from the
battlefield into a place of quiet and safety. Ellen had predicted that
when her sister went into the white world she would never join in the
coarse abuse of the colored race; but if she married Dick she tacitly
linked herself to these cruel lies. She ab