Peter thought and thought, resignedly now, but persistently, how this strange happiness that belonged to them both could be.  He was content, yet he felt he ought not to be content.  He thought there must be something base in himself, yet he felt that there was not.  He drank the wine of his honeymoon marveling.

On the morning before the Red Cloud entered the port of Cairo Mrs. Higgman was out of the cabin, and Peter stood at the little square window, with his arm about Cissie’s waist, looking out to the rear of the steamer.  A strong east wind blew the spray away from the glass, and Peter could see the huge wheel covered with a waterfall thundering beneath him.  Back of the wheel stretched a long row of even waves and troughs.  Every seventh or eighth wave tumbled over on itself in a swash of foam.  These flashing stern waves strung far up the river.  On each side of the great waterway stretched the flat shores of Kentucky and Ohio.  Here and there over the broad clay-colored water moved other boats—­tow-boats, a string of government auto-barges, a snag-boat, another packet.

Peter gave up his question.  The curves of Cissie’s form in his arm held a sweetness and a restfulness that her maidenhood had never promised.  He felt so deeply sure of his happiness that it seemed strange to him that he could not aline his emotions and his mind.

As Peter stood staring up the Ohio River, it occurred to him that perhaps, in some queer way, the morals of black folk were not the morals of white folk; perhaps the laws that bound one race were not the laws that bound the other.  It might be that white anathemas were black blessings.  Peter thought along this line peacefully for several minutes.

And finally he concluded that, after all, morals and conventions, right and wrong, are merely those precepts that a race have practised and found good in its evolution.  Morals are the training rules that keep a people fit.  It might very well be that one moral regime is applicable to one race, and quite another to another.

The single object of all morals is racial welfare, the racial integrity, the breeding of strong children to perpetuate the species.  If the black race possess a more exuberant vitality than some other race, then the black would not be forced to practise so severe a vital economy as some less virile folk.  Racial morals are simply a question of having and spending within safety limits.

Peter knew that for years white men had held a prejudice against marrying widows.  This is utterly without grounds except for one reason:  the first born of a woman is the lustiest.  Among the still weaker Aryans of India the widows burn themselves.  Among certain South Sea Islanders only the first-born may live and mate; all other children are slain.  Among nearly every white race marriage lines are strictly drawn, and the tendency is to have few children to a family, to conserve the precious vital impulse.  So strong is this feeling of birth control that to-day nearly all American white women are ashamed of large families.  This shame is the beginning of a convention; the convention may harden into a cult, a law, or a religion.