gross but really innocent diversions was occasionally visiting a certain
black house of prostitution, of which there were many in St. Louis. Here
while he played a flute and some one else a tambourine or small drum, he
would have two or three of the inmates dance in some weird savage way
that took one instanter to the wilds of Central Africa. There was, so
far as I know, no payment of any kind made in connection with this. He
was a friend, in some crude, artistic or barbaric way. He satisfied, I
am positive, some love of color, sound and the dance in these queer
revels.

Nor do I know how he achieved these friendships, such as they were. I
was never with him when he did. But aside from the satiation they
afforded his taste for the strange and picturesque, I am sure they
reflected no gross or sensual appetite. But I wish to attest in passing
that the mere witnessing of these free scenes had a tonic as well as
toxic effect on me. As I view myself now, I was a poor, spindling,
prying fish, anxious to know life, and yet because of my very narrow
training very fearsome of it, of what it might do to me, what dreadful
contagion of thought or deed it might open me to! Peter was not so. To
him all, positively _all_, life was good. It was a fascinating
spectacle, to be studied or observed and rejoiced in as a spectacle.
When I look back now on the shabby, poorly-lighted, low-ceiled room to
which he led me "for fun," the absolutely black or brown girls with
their white teeth and shiny eyes, the unexplainable, unintelligible love
of rhythm and the dance displayed, the beating of a drum, the sinuous,
winding motions of the body, I am grateful to him. He released my mind,
broadened my view, lengthened my perspective. For as I sat with him,
watching him beat his drum or play his flute, noted the gayety, his love
of color and effect, and feeling myself _low_, a criminal, disgraced,
the while I was staring with all my sight and enjoying it intensely, I