She put out a hand and stopped him; then talked on in justification of her determination to go away.

“I just can’t endure it any longer, Peter.”  She shuddered again.  “I can’t stand Niggertown, or this side of town—­any of it.  They—­they have no feeling for a colored girl, Peter, not—­not a speck!” She rave a gasp, and after a moment plunged on into her wrongs:  “When—­when one of us even walks past on the street, they—­they whistle and say a-all kinds of things out loud, j-just as if w-we weren’t there at all.  Th-they don’t c-care; we’re just n-nigger w-women.”  Cissie suddenly began sobbing with a faint catching noise, her full bosom shaken by the spasms; her tears slowly welling over.  She drew out a handkerchief with a part of its lace edge gone, and wiped her eyes and cheeks, holding the bit of cambric in a ball in her palm, like a negress, instead of in her fingers, like a white woman, as she had been taught.  Then she drew a deep breath, swallowed, and became more composed.

Peter stood looking in helpless anger at this representative of all women of his race.

“Cissie, that’s street-corner scum—­the dirty sewage—­”

“They make you feel naked,” went on Cissie in the monotone that succeeds a fit of weeping, “and ashamed—­and afraid.”  She blinked her eyes to press out the undue moisture, and looked at Peter as if asking what else she could do about it than to go away from the village.

“Will it be any better away from here?” suggested Peter, doubtfully.

Cissie shook her head.

“I—­I suppose not, if—­if I go alone.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” agreed Peter, somberly.  He started to hearten her by saying white women also underwent such trials, if that would be a consolation; but he knew very well that a white woman’s hardships were as nothing compared to those of a colored woman who was endowed with any grace whatever.

“And besides, Cissie,” went on Peter, who somehow found himself arguing against the notion of her going, “I hardly see how a decent colored woman gets around at all.  Colored boarding-houses are wretched places.  I ate and slept in one or two, coming home.  Rotten.”  The possibility of Cissie finding herself in such a place moved Peter.

The girl nodded submissively to his judgment, and said in a queer voice:  “That’s why I—­I didn’t want to travel alone, Peter.”

“No, it’s a bad idea—­” and then Peter perceived that a queer quality was creeping into the tete-a-tete.

She returned his look unsteadily, but with a curious persistence.

[Illustration:  “You-you mean you want m-me—­to go with you, Cissie?” he stammered]

“I—­I d-don’t want to travel a-alone, Peter,” she gasped.

Her look, her voice suddenly brought home to the an the amazing connotation of her words.  He stared at her, felt his face grow warm with a sharp, peculiar embarrassment.  He hardly knew what to say or do before her intent and piteous eyes.