She had asked Peter to marry her and had been
refused. She had humbled herself for naught. That was the very tar of
shame. Peter knew that in the moral categories of Niggertown Cissie
would suffer more from such a rebuff than if she had lied or committed
theft and adultery every day in the calendar. She had been refused
marriage. All the folk-ways of Niggertown were utterly topsyturvy. It
was a crazy-house filled with the most grotesque moral measures.
It seemed to Peter as he entered the cedar-glade that he had lost all
sympathy with this people from which he had sprung. He looked upon them
as strange, incomprehensible beings, just as a man will forget his own
childhood and look upon children as strange, incomprehensible little
creatures. In the midst of his thoughts he heard himself saying to Jim
Pink:
"I suppose it is as dusty as ever."
"Dustier 'an ever," assured Jim Pink.
Apparently their conversation had recurred to the weather, after all.
A chill silence encompassed the glade. The path the negroes followed
wound this way and that among reddish boulders, between screens of
intergrown cedars, and over a bronze mat of needles.
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