prang.
It was like looking at an open sore that touched all of Niggertown, men
and boys, young girls and women. It caused tragedies, murders, fights,
and desertions in the black village as regularly as the rotation of the
calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it. Peter wondered
how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.

With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of
dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed
hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.

The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it
always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl's path gentle
and smooth. There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it
seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed. Then, too, Cissie was
moved by a passion for self-betterment. She deserved a cleaner field
than the Niggertown of Hooker's Bend.

Peter took Parson Ranson's arm, and the two moved to the gate by common
consent. It was no longer pleasant to sit here. The quarrel they had
heard somehow had flavored their surroundings.

Peter turned his steps mechanically northward up the crescent toward the
Dildine cabin. Nothing now restrained him from calling on Cissie; he
would keep no dinner waiting; he would not be warned and berated on his
return home. The nagging, jealous love of his mother had ended.

As the two men walked along, it was borne in upon Peter that his
mother's death definitely ended one period of his life. There was no
reason why he should continue his present unsettled existence. It seemed
best to marry Cissie at once and go North. Further time in this place
would not be good for the girl. Even if he could not lift all
Niggertown, he could at least help Cissie. He had had no idea, when he
first planned his work, what a tremendous task he was essaying. The
white village had looked upon the negroes so long as non-moral and non-
human that the negroes, with the flexibility of their race, had
assimilated that point of view. The whites tried to regulate the negroes
by endless laws. The negroes had come to accept this, and it seemed that
they verily believed that anything not discovered by the constable was
permissible. Mr. Dawson Bobbs was Niggertown's conscience. It was best
for Peter to take from this atmosphere what was dearest to him, and go
at once.

The brown man's thoughts came trailing back to the old negro parson
hob