Excerpt: ...she said, "for every mental, every moral deformity, man is answerable to man. You dwellers in the pleasant places of the world are pitiless in your judgment of the sullen, suspicious, narrow life you find edging forests, clinging to mountain flanks, or stupidly stifling in the heart of some vast plain. I cannot understand the mental cruelty which condemns with contempt human creatures who have had no chance--not one single chance. Are they ignorant? Then bear with them for shame Are they envious, grasping, narrow? Do they gossip about neighbors, do they slander without mercy? What can you expect from starved minds, human intellects unnourished by all that you find so wholesome? Man's progress only inspires man; man's mind alone stimulates man's mind. Where civilization is, there are many men; where is the greatest culture, the broadest thought, the sweetest toleration, there men are many, teaching one another unconsciously, consciously, always advancing, always uplifting, spite of the shallow tide of sin which flows in the footsteps of all progress--" She ceased; her delicate, earnest face relaxed, and a smile glimmered for a moment in her eyes, in the pretty curled corners of her parted lips. "I'm talking very like a school-marm," she said. "I am one, by-the-way, and I teach the children of these people--my people," she added, with an exquisite hint of defiance in her smile. 144 She rested her weight on one arm and leaned towards him a trifle. "In Fox Cross-roads there is much that is hopeless, much that is sorrowful, Mr. Burleson; there is hunger, bodily hunger; there is sickness unsolaced by spiritual or bodily comfort--not even the comfort of death Ah, you should see them--once Once would be enough And no physician, nobody that knows, I tell you--nobody through the long, dusty, stifling summers--nobody through the lengthening bitterness of the black winters--nobody except...