village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was
overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the
eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and
slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.

Peter's room was a rough shed papered with old newspapers. All sorts of
yellow scare-heads streaked his walls. Hanging up was a crayon
enlargement of his mother, her broad face as unwrinkled as an egg and
drawn almost white, for the picture agents have discovered the only way
to please their black patrons is to make their enlargements as nearly
white as possible.

In one corner, on a home-made book-rack, stood Peter's library,--a Greek
book or two, an old calculus, a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy,
and a score of other volumes he had accumulated in his four college
years. As Peter, his head aching, looked at these, he realized how
immeasurably removed he was from the cool abstraction of the study.

The brown man sat down in an ancient rocking-chair by the window, leaned
back, and closed his eyes. His blood still whispered in his ears from
his fight. Notwithstanding his justification, he gradually became filled
with self-loathing. To fight--to hammer and kick in Niggertown's dust--
over a girl! It was an indignity.


Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another
trail. Tump's attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog's.
The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never
entered Tump's head; it never entered any Niggertown head. Here all
attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of sex. Niggertown held no