"Racially?" repeated the man, quite lost.

Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes. "You know very well,
Peter, that you and I are not--are not anything near full bloods. You
know that racially we don't belong in--Niggertown."

Peter never knew exactly how this extraordinary sentence had come about,
but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl
were not of Niggertown. No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter,
who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men
moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to
confusion. He saw the implications at once.

It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed
to have the faculty of touching off. He sat staring at her.

It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up
North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his
own people. It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to
stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate
atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman. It was the Caucasian in them
buried here in Niggertown. It was their part of the tragedy of millions
of mixed blood in the South. Their common problem, a feeling of their
joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness
to the girl.

She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously:

"Why don't you go North, Peter? I think and think about you staying
here. You simply can't grow up and develop here. And now, especially,