Part 44 (1/2)

He touched her arm gently in a caress. ”It has to be good-by, Sister,”

he went on, ”the white world don't meet the colored world to-day. Look at this church here. It's close to white folks' homes but no one ever thinks to come in to wors.h.i.+p. I've sat here and thought of it many times. We ain't really men and women to them. I reckon they don't think we're children of G.o.d.”

”That's it,” Hertha cried, ”and how could I live with any one who thought that?”

”They all think it,” Tom answered.

”No, they don't,” said Hertha angrily; ”my teachers didn't at school.”

”They were women,” Tom replied. ”Women have more religion than men.”

He rose from his seat and stretched himself, his long arms extended, his short coat-sleeves revealing a great expanse of wrist and hand.

”What are you growing so tall for?” Hertha asked, looking up at him.

”I reckon I have to.” He dropped his arms to his sides. ”It's a mistake fer it takes a lot of coat and pants to cover me, and in the bed the sheet don't come up high enough and the blanket's forever slipping by on the floor.”

”Oh, you'll get sick,” his former sister and nurse cried, looking so troubled that Tom had to laugh.

”Don't you worry,” he answered, smiling down at her, ”I've had such a good bringing up that I can't go wrong now, not anyways.”

Nothing that he could have said would have meant so much. She accepted his words in their fullest meaning and felt uplifted, comforted.

Whatever she might make of her own life, she had helped wisely to mold his. If she never saw him again she would know that her influence would stay with him to the end, blossoming in honorable thoughts and kindly deeds.

”And so you advise me to marry?” she said, rising too and trying to speak with a laugh.

”No, ma'am!” with decision. ”I ain't advising you to marry. I's just advising you not to give up marrying.”

”Well,” with a little shrug, ”it amounts to the same thing.”

”What you got to hurry for?” Tom returned to his old charge.

”If I don't decide I can't stay where I am. There is Miss Wood one evening telling me to go on with my work--she loathes d.i.c.k--and Mrs.

Pickens the next telling me to accept a good husband. That's what it's like when d.i.c.k's away, and it's a million times harder when he's around.

I'll move if I give him up.

”I met an old man this winter,” she went on, ”a friend of Kathleen's. He had a terrible philosophy, everything was going to the dogs. You'd have thought that the world would never get any better. But he said one thing to me. He told me to dance and have a good time and to be sure to keep out of the conflict. That was the way he put it, 'Keep out of the conflict.'”

”That might be good advice if you could.”

”I suppose you could,” Hertha said slowly, ”if you made up your mind to; just to have an easy, comfortable time. Now Kathleen was always in the conflict. She was trying to change the world, to change everybody--at least everybody who was poor. And here I can't decide what to do with my own life.”

”It's a heap easier,” Tom remarked meditatively, ”to run other folks'

lives than it is your own.”

They had walked down the aisle to the corridor and now stood by the closed door.

”I haven't made my mind up yet about marriage,” Tom said. ”It's a great risk, it sure is. I was reading the other day about trial marriages.