School had just closed, Miss Patty had given her maid an afternoon off, and the two sisters were walking together toward their home.
"Any plans?" Hertha was startled. "I thought our plans were made for good when we came here."
"I hope not!" Ellen declared decidedly. "I'm willing to work here now for next to nothing, but I shall try for a bigger job some day; and you, honey, you don't always want to be Miss Patty's maid."
"I don't know; why shouldn't I?"
"This is a dull life for you, Hertha. Sometimes I think we ought never to have come here."
"Ellen!"
"It's different for mammy and me; we're older."
"You're only four years older than I."
"I think that really I'm a great deal older than you. But I get so much more out of Merryvale than you do. The people who live in these cabins—well, they're problems to me, human problems that I'm trying to solve. There's hardly a home that hasn't in it some boy or girl whom I'm watching almost as though he were my child. I'm working for the children, Hertha, the colored children who will soon be men and women and who ought to have just as good a chance as white children in this world."
"They never will in America."