But Diada did not heed this warning. She cut off a large hunk of the ham, then sat down and devoured it like a dog.
“Hitch,” Hopey demanded, watching Diada with popping eyeballs, “whut kind of nigger is dis?”
“I dunno,” Hitch murmured. “She muss be some new kind of nigger. She come from furin parts.”
“I can’t cook no vittles as long as I’s got to look at dis circus coon,” Hopey declared. “I’s gwine up-stairs an’ tell ole Mis’ Mildred!”
“Don’t leave her here wid me all by myse’f, Hopey,” Hitch begged. “Take her wid you!”
Hopey walked over and laid her hand on Diada’s arm.
“Come on here, you ole fool,” she said. “Why don’t you ack like nobody else?”
III
ON THE RAMPAGE
Mrs. Mildred Gaitskill was intensely interested in social reforms, uplift movements, purity clubs, and foreign missions. Colonel Tom Gaitskill had often heard her remark that she had “felt a call” to be a missionary to the heathen when she was young; and Mr. Gaitskill, having a better recollection of the characteristics of the superb girl he had taken into his home thirty years before than she had of herself, was often tempted to tell her that she was nothing but a civilized heathen when he married her.
She had just finished writing the last of twenty invitations to the members of the Dunlap Missionary Society. She began a note addressed to Dr. Sentelle, the pastor of her church. After a few words of explanation she wrote: