been able to frame
for himself.

"Still, Cissie, I ought to have used the greatest care--"

"I'm not talking about what you 'ought,'" stated the octoroon, crisply;
"I'm talking about what you are. When it comes to 'ought,' we colored
people must get what we can, any way we can. We fight from the bottom."
The speech held a viperish quality which for a moment caught the brown
man's attention; then he said:

"One thing is sure, I've lost my prestige, whatever it was worth."

The girl nodded slowly.

"With the others you have, I suppose."

Peter glanced at Cissie. The temptation was strong to give the
conversation a personal turn, but he continued on the general topic:

"Well, perhaps it's just as well. My prestige was a bit too flamboyant,
Cissie. All I had to do was to mention a plan. The Sons and Daughters
didn't even discuss it. They put it right through. That wasn't healthy.
Our whole system of society, all democracies are based on discussion.
Our old Witenagemot--"

"But it wasn't _our_ old Witenagemot," said the girl.

"Well--no," admitted the mulatto, "that's true."

They moved along for some distance in silence, when the girl asked:

"What are you going to do now, Peter?"

"Teach, and keep working for that training-school," stated Peter, almost
belligerently. "You didn't expect a little thing like a hundred dollars
to stop me, did you?"

"No-o-o," conceded Cissie, with some reserve of judgment in her tone.
Presently she added, "You could do a lot better up North, Peter."

"For whom?"

"Why, yourself," said the girl, a little surprised.

Siner nodded.

"I thought all that out before I came back here, Cissie. A friend of
mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,--a string
of garages. You'd like Farquhar, Cissie. He's a materialist with an
absolutely inexorable brain. He mechanizes the universe. I told him I
couldn't take his offer. 'It's like this,' I argued: 'if every negro
with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never
progress.' It's really that way, Cissie, it takes a certain mental
atmosphere to develop a people as a whole. A few individuals here and
there may have the strength to spring up by themselves, but the run of
the people--no. I believe one of the greatest curses of the colored race
in the South is the continual draining of its best individuals North.
Farquhar argued--" just then Peter saw that Cissie was not attending his
discourse. S