"But can she?" I compelled myself, quietly, to ask.
"No. If she were to see it, she would never step into your presence again."
"But the Senator! Can he see it?"
"No. Honor makes him blind to such a sight. He could not understand such a violation of hospitality. He has made you almost a member of his family; your misfortune demanded his sympathy, and he gave you his confidence."
"Then you stand alone with your eyes open?" I replied.
"I may stand alone, but other eyes are open—and they wink at one another."
"What! Do you mean that the neighbors—"
"Yes," he broke in, "that is what I mean—the neighbors."
"Washington, you were graduated from the Fisk University, I understand, an institution made possible by the generosity of a band of jubilee singers; and, having been educated at the instance of song, I should think that you would have aspired to poesy rather than to stilted talk and a detective's disposition to pry into affairs that don't concern you."
With the slouching habit of his race, he had been dragging his feet along, but now his heels struck hard upon the road. He sighed like a steam valve, to lessen the pressure of his boiling resentment, but he did not speak. I expected him to turn back in silence, as we were now beneath the light of the street lamp, but he did not; he strode forward as if vaguely in quest of some sort of support, and put his hand on the lamp-post, a hand so black that it looked like a bulge of the iron. And then he turned to me. "Mr. Belford," he said, "an educated negro is an insult to every unthinking white man. And unless he jabbers they call him stilted. Let me tell you, Sir, that I have stretched myself on the floor to read by the firelight because I couldn't afford to buy a candle—struggling to conquer the dialect of my father—and now you reproach me with it. My poor and ignorant people wouldn't listen to me if I talked as they do. Heaven, to them, is a place of magnificence, and the man who paints the picture of Paradise for them must use extravagant colors. Sir, I am no more stilted than you are; you serve the devil on stilts."