ension that had flavored all his
relations with his mother since his return home. But he knew now that
she had felt his disapproval of her lifelong habits; that she saw he
never explained or attempted to explain his thoughts to her, assuming
her to be too ignorant; as she put it, "a fool."

The pathos of his mother's last days, what she had expected, what she
had received, came to Peter with the bitterness of what is finished and
irrevocable. She had been dead only a few minutes, yet she could never
know his grief and remorse; she could never forgive him. She was utterly
removed in a few minutes, in a moment in the failing of a breath. The
finality of death overpowered him.

Into his room, through the thin wall, came the catch of numberless sobs,
the long-drawn open wails, and the spasms of sobbing. Blurred voices
called, "O Gawd! Gawd hab mercy! Hab mercy!" Now words were lost in the
midst of confusion. The clamor boomed through the thin partition as if
it would shake down his newspapered walls. With wet cheeks and an aching
throat, Peter sat by his table, staring at his book-case in silence,
like a white man.

The dim light of his lamp fell over his psychologies and philosophies.
These were the books that had given him precedence over the old
washwoman who kept him in college. It was reading these books that had
made him so wise that the old negress could not even follow his
thoughts. Now in the hour of his mother's death the backs of his
metaphysics blinked at him emptily. What signified their endless pages
about dualism and monism, about phenomenon and noumenon? His mother was
dead. And she had died embittered against him because he had read and
had been bewildered by these empty, wordy volumes.

A sense of profound defeat, of being ultimately fooled and cozened by
the subtleties of white men, filled Peter Siner. He had eaten at their
table, but their meat was not his meat. The uproar continued. Standing
out of the din arose the burden of negro voices "Hab mercy! Gawd hab
mercy!"

In the morning the Ladies of Tabor came and washed and dressed Caroline
Siner's body and made it ready for burial. For twenty years the old
negress had paid ten cents a month to her society to insure her burial,
and now the lodge made ready to fulfil its pledge. After many comings
and goings, the black women called Peter to see their work, as if for
his approval.

The huge dead woman lay on the four-poster with a sheet spread over t