“And right, too. There are eight sides to every question, and generally more. I think the negro question has a hundred. But there is only one side to Henderson Hall. It is a noble institution. I like to think about it, and Uncle Caesar Hollowell crossing the Rubicon in his theological seminary. It is all so beautiful!”
“You are a bad child,” said Margaret. “We should have left you at home.”
“No, not bad, dear; only confused with such a lot of good deeds in a naughty world.”
That this junketing party was deeply interested in the cause of education for whites or blacks, no one would have gathered from the conversation. Margaret felt that Carmen had exactly hit the motives of this sort of philanthropy, and she was both amused and provoked by the girl's mockery. By force of old habit she defended, as well she might, these schools.
“You must have a high standard,” she said. “You cannot have good lower schools without good higher schools. And these colleges, which you think above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the whole mass. You cannot do anything until you educate teachers.”
“So I have always heard,” replied the incorrigible. “I have always been a philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to be again when I go back.”
Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without any concern for the moral problems. They all declared that they liked the negro. But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any amount of badgering. She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of doing something that was demanded by her opportunity. It is so difficult to analyze motives, and in Margaret's case so hard to define the change that had taken place in her. That her heart was not enlisted in this affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew. Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through her husband's eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent with much good feeling and easy-going charity. She also felt the necessity—a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen's—of making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures. Gradually she was learning to play her husband's game in life, and to see no harm in it. What, then, is this thing we call conscience? Is it made of India-rubber? I once knew a clever Southern woman, who said that New England women seemed to her all conscience—Southern women all soul and impulse. If it were possible to generalize in this way, we might say that Carmen had neither conscience nor soul, simply very clever reason. Uncle Jerry had no more conscience than Carmen, but he had a great deal of natural affection. Henderson, with an abundance of good-nature, was simply a man of his time, troubled with no scruples that stood in the way of his success. Margaret, with a finer nature than either of them, stifling her scruples in an atmosphere of worldly-mindedness, was likely to go further than either of them. Even such a worldling as Carmen understood this. “I do things,” she said to Mrs. Laflamme—she made anybody her confidant when the fit was on her—“I do things because I don't care. Mrs. Henderson does the same, but she does care.”
Margaret would be a sadder woman, but not a better woman, when the time came that she did not care. She had come to the point of accepting Henderson's methods of overreaching the world, and was tempering the result with private liberality. Those were hypocrites who criticised him; those were envious who disparaged him; the sufficient ethics of the world she lived in was to be successful and be agreeable. And it is difficult to condemn a person who goes with the general opinion of his generation. Carmen was under no illusions about Henderson, or the methods and manners of which she was a part. “Why pretend?” she said. “We are all bad together, and I like it. Uncle Jerry is the easiest person to get on with.” I remember a delightful, wicked old baroness whom I met in my youth stranded in Geneva on short allowance—European resorts are full of such characters. “My dear,” she said, “why shouldn't I renege? Why shouldn't men cheat at cards? It's all in the game. Don't we all know we are trying to deceive each other and get the best of each other? I stopped pretending after Waterloo. Fighting for the peace of Europe! Bah! We are all fighting for what we can get.”
So the Catachoobee Henderson Hall was dedicated, and Mr. Henderson got great credit out of it.
“It's a noble deed, Mr. Henderson,” Carmen remarked, when they were at dinner on the car the day of their departure. “But”—in an aside to her host—“I advise the lambs in Wall Street to look alive at your next deal.”