"Yes, but Mrs. Grundy in her best intents and purposes."
"In her race conscience," wailed Ramsey to the breeze.
"In her race conscience," assented Hugh.
Ramsey whipped around. "Thought you had no argument."
"I'm giving grandfather's," said the grandson.
"Humph! it's yours. I'd know it at sight—by the color."
"Miss Ramsey," said the old man, toying with his cane, "Hugh and I have been finding that, right or wrong, Mrs. Grundy or Mr. Grundy, race conscience is a wonderful, unaccountable thing for which men will give their life-blood by thousands." His voice failed. He waved smilingly to Hugh.
"And when," broke in Hugh to Ramsey, "when Mrs. Grundy, in her race conscience, says Phyllis is not white no one ought to snap his fingers in even Mrs. Grundy's face merely to please himself or to relieve some private situation."
Ramsey stood up, flashing first on him and then to her mother, dropped again, and with her face in her elbow on the chair's back recited drearily—from her third reader:
"You can hear him swing his heavy sledge