“I suppose I could if I tried.”

“Well, you had better try than to be trying to string verses together.  You seem to think that there must be something very great about you.  I know where you want to get.  You want to get among the upper tens, but you haven’t got style enough about you for that.”

“That’s just what I tell her,” said her grandmother.  “She’s got too many airs for a girl in her condition.  She talks about writing a book, and she is always trying to make up what she calls poetry.  I expect that she will go crazy some of these days.  She is all the time talking to herself, and I just think it is a sin for her to be so much taken up with her poetry.”

“You had better put her to work; had she not better go out to service?”

“No, I am going to let her graduate first.”

“What’s the use of it?  When she’s through, if she wants to teach, she will have to go away.”

“Yes, I know that, but Mrs. Lasette has persuaded me to let Annette graduate, and I have promised that I would do so, and besides I think to take Annette from school just now would almost break her heart.”

“Well, mother, that is just like you; you will work yourself almost to death to keep Annette in school, and when she is through what good will it do her?”

“Maybe something will turn up that you don’t see just now.  When a good thing turns up if a person ain’t ready for it they can’t take hold of it.”

“Well, I hope a good husband will turn up for my Alice.”

“But maybe the good husband won’t turn up for Annette.”

“That is well said, for they tell me that Annette is not very popular, and that some of the girls are all the time making fun of her.”

“Well, they had better make fun of themselves and their own bad manners.  Annette is poor and has no father to stand by her, and I cannot entertain like some of their parents can, but Annette, with all her faults, is as good as any of them.  Talk about the prejudice of the white people, I think there is just as much prejudice among some colored as there is among them, only we do not get the same chance to show it; we are most too mixed up and dependent on one another for that.”  Just then Mrs. Lasette entered the room and Mrs. Hanson, addressing her, said, “We were just discussing Annette’s prospects.  Mother wants to keep Annette at school till she graduates, but I think she knows enough now to teach a country school and it is no use for mother to be working as she does to keep Annette in school for the sake of letting her graduate.  There are lots of girls in A.P. better off than she who have never graduated, and I don’t see that mother can afford to keep Annette at school any longer.”

“But, Eliza, Annette is company for me and she does help about the house.”

“I don’t think much of her help; always when I come home she has a book stuck under her nose.”