His career in Niggertown formed a record of slight
mistakes, but they were not to be undone, and their combined force had
swung him a long way from the course he had plotted for himself. There
was no way to explain. Hooker's Bend would judge him by the sheer
surface of his works. What he had meant to do, his dreams and altruisms,
they would never surmise. That was the irony of the thing.
Then he thought of Cissie Dildine who did understand him. This thought
might have been Cissie's cue to enter the stage of Peter's mind. Her
oval, creamy face floated between Peter's eyes and the dog-eared primer.
He thought of Cissie wistfully, and of her lonely fight for good
English, good manners, and good taste. There was a pathos about Cissie.
Peter got up from his chair and looked out at his high window into the
early afternoon. He had been poring over primers for three days,
stuffing the most heterogeneous facts. His head felt thick and slightly
feverish. Through his window he saw the side of another negro cabin, but
by looking at an angle eastward he could see a field yellow with corn, a
valley, and, beyond, a hill wooded and glowing with the pageantry of
autumn.
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