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“It isn’t that he feels unkindly toward her–he’s too good and too generous for that. Why, it was Harvey who suggested that wages should go on just the same after she leaves us–he has even offered to double them if it will make her any better satisfied with the move. I’m sure, though, it can’t be the question of money that figures with her. She never tells anyone about her own private affairs, but after all these years she must have a nice little sum saved up. I can’t remember when she spent anything on herself–she was always so thrifty about money. At least she was careful about our expenditures, and of course she must have been about her own. So it can’t be that. Harvey puts it down to plain stubbornness. He says after the first wrench of the separation is over she ought to be happier, when she’s taking things easy in her own little house, than she is now, trying to do all the work in our house. He says he wants several servants in our home–a butler, and a maid to wait on me and Mildred, and a housemaid and a cook. He says we can’t have them if we keep Aunt Sharley. And we can’t, either–she’d drive them off the place. No darky could get along with her a week. Oh, I just don’t know what to do!”

“And whut does Aunt Sharley say?” asked the Judge.

“I told you. Sometimes she says she won’t go and sometimes she says she can’t go. But she won’t tell why she can’t–just keeps on declaring up and down that she can’t. She makes a different excuse or she gives a different reason every morning; she seems to spend her nights thinking them up. Sometimes I think she is keeping something back from me–that she isn’t telling me the real cause for her refusal to accept the situation and make the best of it. You know how secretive our coloured people can be sometimes.”

“All the time, you mean,” amended the old man. “Northerners never seem to be able to git it through their heads that a darky kin be loud-mouthed and close-mouthed at the same time. Now you take that black boy Jeff of mine. Jeff knows more about me–my habits, my likes and my dislikes, my private business and my private thoughts and all–than I know myself. And I know jest egsactly ez much about his real self–whut he thinks and whut he does behind my back–ez he wants me to know, no more and no less. I judge it’s much the same way with your Aunt Sharley, and with all the rest of their race too. We understand how to live with ’em, but that ain’t sayin’ we understand how they live.”

He looked steadfastly at his late ward.

“Honey, when you come to cast up the account you do owe a lot to that old nigger woman, don’t you?–you and your sister both. Mebbe you owe even more than you think you do. There ain’t many left like her in this new generation of darkies that’s growed up–she belongs to a species that’s mighty nigh extinct, ez you might say. Us Southern people are powerfully given, some of us, to tellin’ whut we’ve done fur the black race–and we have done a lot, I’ll admit–but sometimes I think we’re prone to furgit some of the things they’ve done fur us. Hold on, honey,” he added hastily, seeing that she was about to speak in her own defence. “I ain’t takin’ issue with you aginst you nor yit aginst the young man you’re fixin’ to marry. After all, you’ve got your own lives to live. I was jest sort of studyin’ out loud–not offerin’ an argument in opposition.”

Still looking straight at her he asked a question:

“Tell me one thing, Emmy Lou, jest to satisfy my curiosity and before we go any further with this here bothersome affair that’s makin’ you unhappy. It seems like to me I heared somewheres that you first met this young man of yours whilst you and little Mildred were off at Knollwood Seminary finishin’ your educations. Is that so or ain’t it?”