Melanctha these days wandered very widely.  She was always alone now when she wandered.  Melanctha did not need help now to know, or to stay longer, or when she wanted, to escape.

Melanctha tried a great many men, in these days before she was really suited.  It was almost a year that she wandered and then she met with a young mulatto.  He was a doctor who had just begun to practice.  He would most likely do well in the future, but it was not this that concerned Melanctha.  She found him good and strong and gentle and very intellectual, and all her life Melanctha liked and wanted good and considerate people, and then too he did not at first believe in Melanctha.  He held off and did not know what it was that Melanctha wanted.  Melanctha came to want him very badly.  They began to know each other better.  Things began to be very strong between them.  Melanctha wanted him so badly that now she never wandered.  She just gave herself to this experience.

Melanctha Herbert was now, all alone, in Bridgepoint.  She lived now with this colored woman and now with that one, and she sewed, and sometimes she taught a little in a colored school as substitute for some teacher.  Melanctha had now no home nor any regular employment.  Life was just commencing for Melanctha.  She had youth and had learned wisdom, and she was graceful and pale yellow and very pleasant, and always ready to do things for people, and she was mysterious in her ways and that only made belief in her more fervent.

During the year before she met Jefferson Campbell, Melanctha had tried many kinds of men but they had none of them interested Melanctha very deeply.  She met them, she was much with them, she left them, she would think perhaps this next time it would be more exciting, and always she found that for her it all had no real meaning.  She could now do everything she wanted, she knew now everything that everybody wanted, and yet it all had no excitement for her.  With these men, she knew she could learn nothing.  She wanted some one that could teach her very deeply and now at last she was sure that she had found him, yes she really had it, before she had thought to look if in this man she would find it.

During this year ‘Mis’ Herbert as her neighbors called her, Melanctha’s pale yellow mother was very sick, and in this year she died.

Melanctha’s father during these last years did not come very often to the house where his wife lived and Melanctha.  Melanctha was not sure that her father was now any longer here in Bridgepoint.  It was Melanctha who was very good now to her mother.  It was always Melanctha’s way to be good to any one in trouble.

Melanctha took good care of her mother.  She did everything that any woman could, she tended and soothed and helped her pale yellow mother, and she worked hard in every way to take care of her, and make her dying easy.  But Melanctha did not in these days like her mother any better, and her mother never cared much for this daughter who was always a hard child to manage, and who had a tongue that always could be very nasty.