As Peter sat thinking it over, it came to him that the progress of any race depended, finally, upon the woman having complete power of choosing her mate.  It is woman alone who consistently places the love accent upon other matters than mere flesh and muscle.  Only woman has much sex selectiveness, or is inclined to select individuals with qualities of mind and spirit.

For millions of years these instinctive spiritualizers of human breeding stock have been hampered in their choice of mates by the unrestrained right of the fighting male.  Indeed, the great constructive work of chivalry in the middle ages was to lay, unconsciously, the corner-stone of modern civilization by resigning to the woman the power of choosing from a group of males.

Siner stirred in his chair, surprised at whither his reverie had lead him.  He wondered how he had stumbled upon these thoughts.  Had he read them in a book?  In point of fact, a beating administered by Tump Pack had brought the brown man the first original idea he had entertained in his life.

By this time, Peter’s jaw had reached its maximum swelling and was eased somewhat.  He looked out of his little window, wondering whether Cissie Dildine would choose him—­or Tump Pack.

Peter was surprised to find blue dusk peering through his panes.  All the scare-heads on his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity.  As he rose slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid pistol shots in the cedar glade between Niggertown and the white village.  He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the glade.

CHAPTER IV

Next day the Siner-Pack fight was the focus of news interest in Hooker’s Bend.  White mistresses extracted the story from their black maids, and were amused by it or deprecated Cissie Dildine’s morals as the mood moved them.

Along Main Street in front of the village stores, the merchants and hangers-on discussed the affair.  It was diverting that a graduate of Harvard should come back to Hooker’s Bend and immediately drop into such a fracas.  Old Captain Renfrew, one-time attorney at law and representative of his county in the state legislature, sat under the mulberry in front of the livery-stable and plunged into a long monologue, with old Mr. Tomwit as listener, on the uneducability of the black race.

“Take a horse, sir,” expounded the captain; “a horse can be trained to add and put its name together out of an alphabet, but no horse could ever write a promissory note and figure the interest on it, sir.  Take a dog.  I’ve known dogs, sir, that could bring your mail from the post-office, but I never saw a dog stop on the way home, sir, to read a post-card.”

Here the old ex-attorney spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier, then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter Siner newly returned from Harvard.