"I hope you ain't forgot yo' 'ligion up at de 'versity, son."
"Oh, no, no, indeed, Mother, but just at that moment, just as you bowed your head, you know, it struck me that—that there is something noble in our race." That was the best he could put it to her.
"Noble—"
"Yes. You know," he went on a little quickly, "sometimes I—I've thought my father must have been a noble man."
The old negress became very still. She was not looking quite at her son, or yet precisely away from him.
"Uh—uh noble nigger,"—she gave her abdominal chuckle. "Why—yeah, I reckon yo' father wuz putty noble as—as niggers go." She sat looking at her son, oddly, with a faint amusement in her gross black face, when a careful voice, a very careful voice, sounded in the outer room, gliding up politely on the syllables:
"Ahnt Carolin'! oh, Ahnt Carolin', may I enter?"
The old woman stirred.
"Da''s Cissie, Peter. Go ast her in to de fambly-room."
When Siner opened the door, the vague resemblance of the slender, creamy girl on the threshold to Ida May again struck him; but Cissie Dildine was younger, and her polished black hair lay straight on her pretty head, and was done in big, shining puffs over her ears in a way that Ida May's unruly curls would never have permitted. Her eyes were the most limpid brown Peter had ever seen, but her oval face was faintly unnatural from the use of negro face powder, which colored women insist on, and which gives their yellows and browns a barely perceptible greenish hue. Cissie wore a fluffy yellow dress some three shades deeper than the throat and the glimpse of bosom revealed at the neck.