nearly always better
informed than is the other and larger group touching on new movements
and growing sentiments amongst the darker-skinned factors. Into the
white man's house, serving in this or that domestic capacity, goes the
negro as an observant witness to the moods and emotions of his or her
employer and bringing away an understanding of the family complexities
and the current trend of opinion as it shapes itself beneath that roof.

But the white man, generally speaking, views the negro's private life
only from the outside, and if he be a Southern-born white man, wise in
his generation, seeks to look no further, for surface garrulity and
surface exuberance do not deceive him, but serve only to make him
realize all the more clearly that he is dealing with members of what at
heart is one of the most secretive and sensitive of all the breeds of
men. But since this started out to be the chronicle of an episode
largely relating to Jeff Poindexter and one other and not a
psychological study of actions and reactions as between the two most
numerous races in this republic, it is perhaps as well that we should
get on with our narrative.

If the leaven of unrest, vague and formless as it was at the outset,
properly might be said to date from the time of the return of divers
black veterans, it took on shape and substance after the advent of one
Dr. J. Talbott Duvall, an individual engaging in manner, and in
language, dress and deportment fascinating beyond degree; likewise an
organizer by profession and a charmer of the opposite sex by reason of
qualifications both natural and acquired.

A doctor he was, as witness the handle to his name, and yet a doctor of
any known variety he was not. Confessedly he was no doctor of medicine,
though his speech dripped gorgeous ear-filling Latin words which sounded
as though they might be the names of difficult and sinister diseases;
nor was he doctor of divinity, though speedily he proved himself to be
at home in pulpits. He was not a horse doctor or a corn doctor or a
conjure doctor or a root-and-herb doctor or a healer by faith or the
laying on of hands. His title, it seemed, was his by virtue of a degree
conferred upon him by a college--a white man's college--somewhere in the
North. His accent was that of a traveled cosmopolite superimposed upon
the speech of a place away off somewhere called the West Indies. He had
money and he spent it; he had a wardrobe of distinction and he wor