Not that she
would come to it vacant-minded, but rather as a trained woman, starved
for companionship and wanting something of the beauty and ease of life.
She sat dreaming of it here with rows of dark faces before her, and the
singsong wail of a little black reader with his head aslant and his
patched kneepants.
The day was warm and languorous, and the last pale mist of the Silver
Fleece peeped in at the windows. She tried to follow the third-reader
lesson with her finger, but persistently off she went, dreaming, to some
exquisite little parlor with its green and gold, the clink of dainty
china and hum of low voices, and the blue lake in the window; she would
glance up, the door would open softly and--
Just here she did glance up, and all the school glanced with her. The
drone of the reader hushed. The door opened softly, and upon the
threshold stood Zora. Her small feet and slender ankles were black and
bare; her dark, round, and broad-browed head and strangely beautiful
face were poised almost defiantly, crowned with a misty mass of waveless
hair, and lit by the velvet radiance of two wonderful eyes. And hanging
from shoulder to ankle, in formless, clinging folds, blazed the scarlet
gown.
_Six_
COTTON
The cry of the naked was sweeping the world. From the peasant toiling in
Russia, the lady lolling in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and
the Esquimaux freezing in Alaska; from long lines of hungry men, from
patient sad-eyed women, from old folk and creeping children went up the
cry, "Clothes, clothes!" Far away the wide black land that belts the
South, where Miss Smith worked and Miss Taylor drudged and Bles and Zora
dreamed, the dense black land sensed the cry and heard the bound of
answering life within the vast dark breast.
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