“Actually,” said Hetty, “if you’d read the book you’d know he’s a Yankee who moved south. The Southern gentleman in the book is a kindly man.”

“Well, people in the South don’t like it, anyhow.”

“The point is not about any individual, Frank. It’s about a system.”

They had walked as far as Thirty-sixth Street. Seeing a cab, Master hailed it, hoping the business of getting in would break his wife’s concentration. It didn’t.

“The system, Frank,” she continued, as soon as they were seated, “whereby one human being can own another as a chattel. This book”—she took it out, and clearly meant to give it to him—“is a Christian book, Frank. A challenge to all Christians. How can we countenance such an evil in our land?”

“And what,” he asked wearily, “do you expect me to do about it?”

She paused. Evidently she had been thinking about it.

“I think, Frank,” she said quietly, “that we ought to consider whether we do business with slave owners.”

He almost cried, “Are you out of your mind?” But fortunately, he caught himself, and waited a few moments before he replied.

“Hard to be a New York merchant and have nothing to do with the cotton trade.”

That was quite an understatement. Generations of New York men had assiduously courted the cotton planters—at first, buying the Southerners’ raw cotton and shipping it to England (when, had they been a bit sharper, the Southern planters could have shipped direct and saved themselves New York’s commissions), and thereafter making their grand, all-purpose trade so indispensable, and their finances so entangled with the South, that it was hard to imagine the one without the other. Frank Master shipped cotton; and he sold goods, and debt, to the South. It was a good percentage of his business.

She put her arm on his. “I know, Frank. I understand that it wouldn’t be easy. But you are also a good Christian. I didn’t marry you just for your money,” she added with a smile.

And I didn’t marry you, he thought to himself, to have you interfere with my making it. As the cab took them home, he said nothing more, but he sensed that his wife was determined about this business. In more than ten years of marriage, he and Hetty had never had a serious quarrel, and he wasn’t sure what it would be like if they did.

At about the time when Frank and Hetty Master had ascended the Observatory, Mary O’Donnell had prepared to leave her friends. They had spent such a pleasant afternoon, the four of them: Mary and Gretchen, and Gretchen’s little brother Theodore and cousin Hans.