“A young lady who graduates from a Northern seminary next week,” responded Eugene.

“I think you are very selfish,” said Lorraine.  “You might have invited a fellow to go with you to be your best man.”

“The wedding is to be strictly private.  The lady whom I am to marry has negro blood in her veins.”

“The devil she has!” exclaimed Lorraine, starting to his feet, and looking incredulously on the face of Leroy.  “Are you in earnest?  Surely you must be jesting.”

“I am certainly in earnest,” answered Eugene Leroy.  “I mean every word I say.”

“Oh, it can’t be possible!  Are you mad?” exclaimed Lorraine.

“Never was saner in my life.”

“What under heaven could have possessed you to do such a foolish thing?  Where did she come from.”

“Right here, on this plantation.  But I have educated and manumitted her, and I intend marrying her.”

“Why, Eugene, it is impossible that you can have an idea of marrying one of your slaves.  Why, man, she is your property, to have and to hold to all intents and purposes.  Are you not satisfied with the power and possession the law gives you?”

“No.  Although the law makes her helpless in my hands, to me her defenselessness is her best defense.”

“Eugene, we have known each other all of our lives, and, although I have always regarded you as eccentric, I never saw you so completely off your balance before.  The idea of you, with your proud family name, your vast wealth in land and negroes, intending to marry one of them, is a mystery I cannot solve.  Do explain to me why you are going to take this extremely strange and foolish step.”

“You never saw Marie?”

“No; and I don’t want to.”

“She is very beautiful.  In the North no one would suspect that she has one drop of negro blood in her veins, but here, where I am known, to marry her is to lose caste.  I could live with her, and not incur much if any social opprobrium.  Society would wink at the transgression, even if after she had become the mother of my children I should cast her off and send her and them to the auction block.”

“Men,” replied Lorraine, “would merely shrug their shoulders; women would say you had been sowing your wild oats.  Your money, like charity, would cover a multitude of faults.”

“But if I make her my lawful wife and recognize her children as my legitimate heirs, I subject myself to social ostracism and a senseless persecution.  We Americans boast of freedom, and yet here is a woman whom I love as I never loved any other human being, but both law and public opinion debar me from following the inclination of my heart.  She is beautiful, faithful, and pure, and yet all that society will tolerate is what I would scorn to do.”

“But has not society the right to guard the purity of its blood by the rigid exclusion of an alien race?”

“Excluding it!  How?” asked Eugene.