The Captain dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand.  “She’s a nigger, Peter; you can’t hire a nigger not to steal.  Born in ’em.  Then I’m not sure but what it would be compounding a felony, hiring a person not to steal; might be so construed.  Well, now, there’s the script.  Read it carefully, my boy, and remember that in order to gain a certain status quo certain antecedents are—­are absolutely necessary, Peter.  Without them my—­my life would have been quite empty, Peter.  It’s—­it’s very strange—­amazing.  You will understand as you read.  I’ll be back to dinner, so good-by.”  In the strangest agitation the old Captain walked out of the library.  The last glimpse Peter had of him was his meager old figure silhouetted against the cold gray fog that filled the compound.

Neither the Captain’s agitation nor his obvious desire that Peter should at once read the new manuscript really got past the threshold of the mulatto’s consciousness.  Peter’s thoughts still hovered about old Rose, and from that point spread to the whole system of colored service in the South.  For Rose’s case was typical.  The wage of cooks in small Southern villages is a pittance—­and what they can steal.  The tragedy of the mothers of a whole race working for their board and thievings came over Peter with a rising grimness.  And there was no public sentiment against such practice.  It was accepted everywhere as natural and inevitable.  The negresses were never prosecuted; no effort was made to regain the stolen goods.  The employers realized that what they paid would not keep soul and body together; that it was steal or perish.

It was a fantastic truth that for any colored girl to hire into domestic service in Hooker’s Bend was more or less entering an apprenticeship in peculation.  What she could steal was the major portion of her wage, if two such anomalous terms may be used in conjunction.

Yet, strange to say, the negro women of the village were quite honest in other matters.  They paid their small debts.  They took their mistresses’ pocket-books to market and brought back the correct change.  And if a mistress grew too indignant about something they had stolen, they would bring it back and say:  “Here is a new one.  I’d rather buy you a new one than have you think I would take anything.”

The whole system was the lees of slavery, and was surely the most demoralizing, the most grotesque method of hiring service in the whole civilized world.  It was so absurd that its mere relation lapses into humor, that bane of black folk.

Such painful thoughts filled the gloomy library and harassed Peter in his copying.  He took his work to the window and tried to concentrate upon it, but his mind kept playing away.

Indeed, it seemed to Peter that to sit in this old room and rewrite the wordy meanderings of the old gentleman’s book was the very height of emptiness.  How utterly futile, when all around him, on every hand, girls like Cissie Dildine were being indentured to corruption!  And, as far as Peter knew, he was the only person in the South who saw it or felt it or cared anything at all about it.