"I should probably say negro. But I've heard they like to call themselves colored. Seems a curious taste. Always suggests variegated to me."
"That is not how we mean it," said Miss Tallmadge solemnly, making way for more ladies who swarmed up the staircase. "We are a little group of people working on purely humanitarian principles, finding succor and employment for the destitute, thrown out of work by—"
"Yes; we know by whom." Then, with a misleading geniality: "This idea of restitution seems to me very right and proper."
Miss Tallmadge's face betrayed perplexity. A shivering little quadroon girl crept up the stairs behind a coal-black old man.
"It is too difficult, perhaps, to make plain our point of view," said Miss Hannah, with quiet dignity, "otherwise I should feel it my duty while you are in Boston to show you—"
"Have you the right," interrupted her visitor, "to bring a stranger to these colored meetings?"
"I have frequently brought a friend. Perhaps—" Miss Hannah's good face brightened. "We don't discuss politics, and perhaps if you could see something of the pains we take to befriend and find homes for these poor creatures—"
"I am ready to attend the meeting," announced Mrs. Gano, tightening her bonnet-strings. "It sounds like a sensible institution. We had the best cooks, the only well-trained servants in America. They must be a godsend here in the North."
She remembered, as she mounted the stairs behind Miss Hannah, that her hostess had not provided 16 Ashburton Place with any of these "colored" joys, and she reflected that she had not yet seen a darky since her arrival except the old man and little girl on in front of them.
A clock struck ten as Miss Tallmadge hurriedly led the way up the second flight to the registry-office. When she caught up to the old negro, the domestic philanthropist applied her handkerchief to her nose.