All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed. Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney’s dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, “Well, I don’t know what he sees in her, I’m sure.” A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh—with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black. “Well, I’ll subscribe ten dollars,” said Miss Pinckney; “I reckon the darkie babies won’t be any the worse for a crêche and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I’d give you forty. I’m sure I don’t know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk 152 the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d’-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s’nough to raise Cain in any one’s heart.” 152 “I know,” replied the dark girl, “and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists.” “Don’t call them my beautiful Abolitionists,” replied the other. “I didn’t make ’em. All the same I don’t believe in whipping and never did. It’s the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn’t. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and we had to suffer. Well, we haven’t ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there’s no knowing what we’ve got to suffer yet.” Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. “Now, that girl,” said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, “is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. She wouldn’t have much mercy on a human creature black or tan or white. Thick skinned. She didn’t even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her crêche. It’s just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so’s to sell the alligator skins to
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