wn had ended in a situation far outside
of his volition. That morning he had started out with some vague idea of
taking Niggertown in his hands and molding it in accordance with his
white ideas; but Niggertown had taken Peter into its hands, had
threatened his life, had administered to him profound mental and moral
shocks, and now had dropped him, like some bit of waste, with his face
set over the Big Hill for white town.

As Peter stood there it seemed to him there was something symbolic in
his attitude. He was no longer of the black world; he was of the white.
He did not understand his people; they eluded him.

He belonged to the white world; not to the village across the hill, but
to the North. Nothing now prevented him from going North and taking the
position with Farquhar. Cissie Dildine was impossible for him now.
Niggertown was immovable, at least for him. He was no Washington to lead
his people to a loftier plane. In fact, Peter began to suspect that he
was no leader at all. He saw now that his initial success with the Sons
and Daughters of Benevolence had been effected merely by the aura of his
college training. After his first misstep he had never rehabilitated
himself. He perhaps had a dash of the artistic in him, and the power to
mold ideas often confuses itself subjectively with the power to mold
human beings. In reality he did not even understand the people he
assumed to mold. A suspicion came to him that under the given conditions
their ways were more rational than his own.

As for Cissie Dildine, his duty by the girl, his queer protective
passion for her--all that was surely past now. After her lapse from all
decency there was no reason why he should spend another thought on her.
He would go North to Chicago.

The last of the twilight was fading in swift, visible gradations of
light. The cedars, the cabins, and the hill faded in pulse-beats of
darkness. Above the Big Hill the last ember of day smoldered against a
green-blue infinity. Here and there a star pricked the dome with a
wintry brilliance.

Then, somehow, the thought of Cissie looking out on that chilly sky
through iron bars tightened Peter's throat. He caught himself up sharply
for his emotion. He began a vague defense of the white man's laws on
grounds as cold and impersonal as the winter evening. Laws, customs, and
conventions were for the strengthening of men, to seed the select, to
winnow the weak. It was white logic, applied firmly, as