It seemed to Peter as he entered the cedar-glade that he had lost all sympathy with this people from which he had sprung.  He looked upon them as strange, incomprehensible beings, just as a man will forget his own childhood and look upon children as strange, incomprehensible little creatures.  In the midst of his thoughts he heard himself saying to Jim Pink: 

“I suppose it is as dusty as ever.”

“Dustier ’an ever,” assured Jim Pink.

Apparently their conversation had recurred to the weather, after all.

A chill silence encompassed the glade.  The path the negroes followed wound this way and that among reddish boulders, between screens of intergrown cedars, and over a bronze mat of needles.  Their steps were noiseless.  The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought to Peter’s mind the night of his mother’s death.  It seemed to him a long time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother’s death and burial bulked in his past as if it had occurred yesterday.

There was no sound in the glade to disturb Peter’s thoughts except a murmur of human voices from some of the innumerable privacies of the place, and the occasional chirp of a waxwing busy over clusters of cedar-balls.

It had been five weeks and a day since Caroline died.  Five weeks and a day; his mother’s death drifting away into the mystery and oblivion of the past.  Likewise, twenty-five years of his own life completed and gone.

A procession of sad, wistful thoughts trailed through Peter’s brain:  his mother, and Ida May, and now Cissie.  It seemed to Peter that all any woman had ever brought him was wistfulness and sadness.  His mother had been jealous, and instead of the great happiness he had expected, his home life with her had turned out a series of small perplexities and pains.  Before that was Ida May, and now here was her younger sister.  Peter wondered if any man ever reached the peace and happiness foreshadowed in his dream of a woman.

* * * * *

A voice calling his name checked Peter’s stride mechanically, and caused him to look about with the slight bewilderment of a man aroused from a reverie.

At the first sound, however, Jim Pink became suddenly alert.  He took three strides ahead of Peter, and as he went he whispered over his shoulder: 

“Beat it, nigger! beat it!”

The mulatto recognized one of Jim Pink’s endless stupid attempts at comedy.  It would be precisely Jim Pink’s idea of a jest to give Peter a little start.  As the mulatto stood looking about among the cedars for the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation.  It was almost a mania with Jim Pink; it verged on the pathological.