“You must have a high standard,” she said.  “You cannot have good lower schools without good higher schools.  And these colleges, which you think above the colored people, will stimulate them and gradually raise the whole mass.  You cannot do anything until you educate teachers.”

“So I have always heard,” replied the incorrigible.  “I have always been a philanthropist about the negro till I came down here, and I intend to be again when I go back.”

Mrs. Laflamme was not a very eager apostle either, and the young ladies devoted themselves to the picturesque aspects of the population, without any concern for the moral problems.  They all declared that they liked the negro.  But Margaret was not to be moved from her good-humor by any amount of badgering.  She liked Henderson Hall; she was proud of the consideration it brought her husband; she had a comfortable sense of doing something that was demanded by her opportunity.  It is so difficult to analyze motives, and in Margaret’s case so hard to define the change that had taken place in her.  That her heart was not enlisted in this affair, as it would have been a few years before, she herself knew.  Insensibly she had come to look at the world, at men and women, through her husband’s eyes, to take the worldly view, which is not inconsistent with much good feeling and easy-going charity.  She also felt the necessity—­a necessity totally unknown to such a nature as Carmen’s—­of making compensation, of compounding for her pleasures.  Gradually she was learning to play her husband’s game in life, and to see no harm in it.  What, then, is this thing we call conscience?  Is it made of India-rubber?  I once knew a clever Southern woman, who said that New England women seemed to her all conscience—­Southern women all soul and impulse.  If it were possible to generalize in this way, we might say that Carmen had neither conscience nor soul, simply very clever reason.  Uncle Jerry had no more conscience than Carmen, but he had a great deal of natural affection.  Henderson, with an abundance of good-nature, was simply a man of his time, troubled with no scruples that stood in the way of his success.  Margaret, with a finer nature than either of them, stifling her scruples in an atmosphere of worldly-mindedness, was likely to go further than either of them.  Even such a worldling as Carmen understood this.  “I do things,” she said to Mrs. Laflamme—­she made anybody her confidant when the fit was on her—­“I do things because I don’t care.  Mrs. Henderson does the same, but she does care.”

Margaret would be a sadder woman, but not a better woman, when the time came that she did not care.  She had come to the point of accepting Henderson’s methods of overreaching the world, and was tempering the result with private liberality.  Those were hypocrites who criticised him; those were envious who disparaged him; the sufficient ethics of the world she lived in was to be successful and be agreeable.