“I must distress you whatever I say, Vincent!  Frankly, I don’t think you can decide just now whether your heart is really engaged.  I think you do not know me as a man should knows the woman he makes his wife.  I am certain I do not know you.  If you had been born and bred in the North, I should have no difficulty in deciding; but your ways are so different here:  women are accorded so much before marriage, and made so little of a man’s life after marriage, that I shrink from a promise which, if lightly or inconsiderately given, would bring the last misery a woman can confront.”

“What, Olympia! you think Southern men do not hold marriage to be sacred?”

“I think that the Southern man has a good deal of the knight you spoke of in him, and, like the Frenchman, marries inconsiderately, and does penance in infidelity, at least to the form, if not the fact, of the relation.”

“O Olympia! where do you get such repulsive ideas of us; who has been traducing us to you?”

“I judge from the Southern men I have seen North; pardon me, Vincent, I do not see how it can be otherwise in a society based upon human servitude.  To live on the labors of a helot people blunts the finer sensibilities of men and women alike; when you can look unshrinkingly at the separation of husband and wife on the auction-block, when you can see innocent children taken from their mothers and sold into eternal separation, I think it is not unnatural in me to fear that a woman with my convictions would not be happy mated with a Southerner.  All this is cruel, I fear you will think, but it would be crueller for me to encourage a love that, under present circumstances, would bring misery to both of us.”

“You are an abolitionist?”

“Yes; every right-thinking person in the North is an abolitionist to this extent; we want the South to take the remedy into its own hands, to free its slaves voluntarily; the radical abolitionists prefer a violent means.  That I do not seek or did not; but now, Vincent, it is bound to come.”

“And, if it should come, what would you answer to my question?”

“Here is a white rose:  I picked it with my hand, and, you see, a drop of my blood is on it; when you can give me a rose with a drop of your blood on it as free from taint as the stain mine makes, I shall have an answer that will not be unworthy your waiting for!”

“Unworthy!  I don’t understand you.  Surely, you don’t think me a profligate?”

“When the time comes that no human being acknowledges your ownership, perhaps you may receive a voluntary bond-maid, bound to you by stronger ties than the chattel of the slave.”

“But you love me, then, Olympia?”

“I can not love where I do not reverence.”

“But it is not my fault that slaves are my inheritance!”

“It will be your fault if they are your support when you are your own master.”

“You love an idea better than you love a man who would die for you!”