"Never," said Carolina, coolly, "if you mean on your part! You did everything that was wrong and nothing that was right. And the worst of it is that you are morally blind to your share of the blame."
"Why, Miss Carolina, what do you mean? I didn’t go to lose their money. It hit me just as hard as it did them. I didn’t make a cent."
"But the money that you lost wasn’t yours to lose," cried Carolina, hotly.
"No, but I didn’t do wrong intentionally. You can’t blame a man for a mistake."
"There is such a thing as criminal negligence," said the girl, deliberately. "You had no business to trust an affair where your honour was pledged to an incompetent cracker foreman, and go to New York on the company’s money, even if you did think you would earn the money to pay it back. How do you ever expect to pay it?"
"I don’t expect to pay it at all, and I reckon those Yankees don’t expect it, either."
"No, I don’t suppose they do," said Carolina, bitterly.
"Well, if they are satisfied to lose it, and have forgotten all about it, would you bother to pay it back if you were in my place?"
"I would pay it back if I had to pay it out of my life insurance and be buried in a pine coffin in the potter’s field! And as to those Northerners having forgotten it,--don’t you believe it! They have simply laid it to what they call the to-be-expected dishonesty of the South when dealing with the North. The South calls it ’keeping their eyes peeled,’ ’being wide-awake,’ ’not being caught napping,’ or catch phrases of that order. But the strictly honest business man calls it dishonest trickery, and mentally considers all Southerners inoculated with its poison. Do you know what Southern credit is worth in the North?"
Moultrie only looked sulky, but Carolina went on, spurred by her own despair and disillusionment.
"Well, you wouldn’t be proud of it if you did! And just such a tolerant view of a thoroughly wrong transaction as you have thus divulged is responsible. Colonel Yancey was right. The South is heart-breaking!"
"Do you care so much?" asked Moultrie, softly.
Carolina lifted herself so proudly that the mare danced under her. She saw that she had gone too far. She also felt that error had mocked her. She had despaired of Moultrie’s blind and false point of view when the Light of the world was at hand. Immediately her thought flew upwards.