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 she, during the centuries, lost this vital instinct?

Her memory returned to her childhood days, to her mother and father. Her mother's father had been a freed slave who had been given a slice of land together with the custody of his own body. On this land he had prospered sufficiently to send his daughter to Fisk. Before she had married William Love she herself had taught school. The thought of her father almost invariably brought affectionate tears to Mary's eyes. To her he was an example of how perfect a man might be: straight, handsome, tall, distinguished, honest and upright, just and intelligent: his countenance and bearing reflected his character. Sweet and gentle he was too, and yet, Mary still remembered with a little thrill how the mere reading in a newspaper of an account of a lynching in Georgia, a particularly ghastly lynching, had thrown him into such a fit of rage that he had seized his revolver and started to leave the house, threatening to kill the first white man he encountered. She recalled how her mother, moved, too, beyond her bent, had experienced the greatest difficulty in persuading him to relinquish his purpose, employing, indeed, every weapon of persuasion at her command, even resorting to what little physical force she possessed. He had not gone. The revolver had dropped from his relaxed finger-tips, and the patient, resigned expression she knew so well had returned to his eyes. Mary was five years old when this had happened, but she could still remem-