Through the hour that passed in the hot little kitchen Hertha told her story, Kathleen experiencing every emotion from incredulity to overmastering indignation. During the recital the narrator herself was strangely aloof, speaking as though she were an onlooker anxious to retail correctly each point but indifferent to the effect she was producing. She sought neither advice nor comfort. Her hard, steady tone, never varying in pitch or intensity, gave the impression of one with whom something was completed, finished beyond possibility of change. At the last, when her listener carried out of herself with anger at the attack upon Tom indulged in fierce invective, she relaxed a little, and spoke more naturally as she described her strategy and its success. But to Kathleen's words of admiration, to her condemnation of her lover, she paid no heed.
"Tom came to tell me Mammy was ill," she ended. "She was ill this winter but they didn't know what it was. Now she has had another stroke and may not live until we get there. Tom and I must go to-morrow, even though he is so weak. He's her only son."
"How will you go?" Kathleen asked.
"You'll lend me something to wear, won't you? I shan't need much."
"Of course," was the swift answer. "I wasn't thinking of that."
"You mean how shall I travel? I shall travel in the jim crow coach with Tom. He's my brother, you know, I'm colored."
She spoke in a hard, emotionless voice. Perplexed, Kathleen smiled up at her.
"Oh, I mean it," the southern girl said, straightening in her chair. "I'm going home. I shall never be white again."
"Dearie," the Irishwoman replied, "you talk as if color were a state of mind."
"Isn't it?" Hertha asked.