"So you aren't going to marry me, Peter?" Woman-like, now that she was well into the subject, she was far less embarrassed than Peter. She had had her cry.
"Why—er—considering this work, Cissie—"
"Aren't you going to marry anybody, Peter?"
The artist in Peter, the thing the girl loved in him, caught again that Messianic vision of himself.
"Why, no, Cissie," he said, with a return of his inspiration of an hour ago; "I'll be going here and there all over the South preaching this gospel of kindliness and tolerance, of forgiveness of the faults of others." Cissie looked at him with a queer expression. "I'll show the white people that they should treat the negro with consideration not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of themselves. It's so simple, Cissie, it's so logical and clear—"
The girl shook her head sadly.
"And you don't want me to go with you, Peter?"
"Why, n-no, Cissie; a girl like you couldn't go. Perhaps I'll be misunderstood in places, perhaps I may have to leave a town hurriedly, or be swung over the walls, like Paul, in a basket." He attempted to treat it lightly.
But the girl looked at him with a horror dawning in her melancholy face.
"Peter, do you really mean that?" she whispered.