“And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”
I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal Street.
“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”
“Why?”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Need you have asked that? The North won.”
“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.
“That’s my ‘sacred trust.’”
It made her look at me. “Yours?”
“Not yours—yet! It would be yours if you had won.” I thought a slight change came in her steady scrutiny. “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don’t expect them to change, but they mustn’t expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them—here’s the negro. We can’t kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it’s like two men having to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white. And it will end so.”
She was eager. “Slavery again, you think?”