I was quite willing to agree with her, but I managed to dry her tears. Discovering that she expected to spend two nights in a day coach, and remembering one dreadful night when I could get no berth, I gave her the money for a sleeping-car ticket both ways, as a farewell gift. The tears broke forth afresh. “You been so good to me and to my sister,” she sobbed. “Ay can’t never forget dat!”
“Cheer up,” I answered, wiping the mist from my own eyes. “Go on, and have the best time you ever had in your life, and don’t worry about me—I’ll get along somehow. And if you need money while you are away, write to me, and I’ll send you whatever you need. We’ll fix it up afterward.”
Once again she looked at me, with the strangest look I have ever seen on the human face.
“Tank you,” she said slowly. “Dere iss not many ladies would say dat.”
“Perhaps not,” I replied, “but, remember, Annie, I can trust you.”
“Yes,” she cried, her face illumined as by some great inward light, “you can trust me!”
I do not think she loves us yet, but I believe in time she will.
The day the new girl came, I happened to overhear a much valued reference to myself: “Honestly,” she said, “Ay been here more dan one year, and Ay never hear a wrong word between her and him, nor between her and me. It’s shust wonderful. Ay isn’t been see anyting like it since Ay been in diss country.”
“Is it so wonderful?” I asked myself, as I stole away, my own heart aglow with the consciousness of a moral victory, “and is the lack of self-control and human kindness at the bottom of the American servant problem? Are we women such children that we cannot deal wisely with our intellectual inferiors?” And more than all I had given her, as I realised then for the first time, was the power of self-discipline and self-control which she, all unknowingly, had developed in me.