e wiped his face with his handkerchief and,
getting up, began to pace the room. "That stiff old maid with her darned
talk makes me want to kill somebody."

He stopped in front of Mrs. Pickens and took up the subject again.
"Haven't I known the niggers? They worked my father's land, when they
didn't loaf and get drunk. Pure women! Every mother's child with a
different father! I know 'em. Ain't I seen 'em, the splay-footed,
stinking devils!"

Mrs. Pickens looked at him, surprised at the intensity of his feeling.
She had taken the black people all her life as a matter of course,
accepting their failings and shortcomings, never questioning their
inferiority, but also never questioning their good qualities and their
value in the world in which she was reared.

"I think you ought not to talk that way about any human being," she said
gently, "and on Sunday, too."

"They ain't human," Dick declared, and then added sulkily, "anyway not
more than half human."

"You don't believe," Mrs. Pickens spoke a little hesitatingly, "you
don't think, Dick, that they're our brothers in Christ?"

"No," he roared in answer, "they're no brothers of mine, the dirty,
big-lipped, splay-footed bucks. What are you giving me? Want me to take
'em into my parlor, marry 'em to my sisters----"

"Oh, come!" said Mrs. Pickens, with a little laugh, "I'm a southerner,
you know! You don't have to talk that stuff to me."

"Well, and ain't I a southerner? No, I'm nothing but a cheap Georgia
cracker, that's what I am. But I ain't a nigger lover, anyway. Pretty
way to talk to a feller, ain't it, now?" he said, facing Mrs. Pickens,
the anger dying in his eyes.

"It was very unkind; I don't wonder you're angry." Then she added,
looking keenly at him, "If she thinks that way about you, why don't you
give her up?"

"Oh, don't say that!" The lad's whole appearance changed, his mouth
softened, the tears started to his eyes. He gripped the table and looked
at his woman friend as though she had struck him a blow. "I couldn't
stand that. I love her so."

"But you know, Dick," there was a teasing smile on Mrs. Pickens' face,
"an attractive girl like Hertha is sure to have a lot of beaus, and she
can't marry all of them."

"There isn't anybody else; you can see for yourself there isn't anybody
else. I've got to have her. I'll go to the devil if I don't!"

He was so changed, so shaken with feeling, that Mrs. Pickens took the
hand that hung by his side and pa