“You mean deceit, I suppose.”

“No, I mean diplomacy.  But that isn’t a very healthy frame of mind,—­ always to be suppressing and guarding yourself.”

Peter didn’t know about that.  He was inclined to argue the matter, but Cissie wouldn’t argue.  She seemed to assume that all of her statements were axioms, truths reduced to the simplest possible mental terms, and that proof was unnecessary, if not impossible.  So the topic went into the discard.

“Been baking my brains over a lot of silly little exam questions,” complained Peter.  “Can you trace the circulation of the blood?  I think it leaves the grand central station through the right aorta, and then, after a schedule run of nine minutes, you can hear it coming up the track through the left ventricle, with all the passengers eager to get off and take some refreshment at the lungs.  I have the general idea, but the exact routing gets me.”

Cissie laughed accommodatingly.

“I wonder why it’s necessary for everybody to know that once.  I did.  I could follow the circulation the right way or backward.”

“Must have been harder backward, going against the current.”

Cissie laughed again.  A girl’s part in a witty conversation might seem easy at first sight.  She has only to laugh at the proper intervals.  However, these intervals are not always distinctly marked.  Some girls take no chances and laugh all the time.

Cissie’s appreciation was the sedative Peter needed.  The relief of her laughter and her presence ran along his nerves and unkinked them, like a draft of Kentucky Special after a debauch.  The curves of her cheek, the tilt of her head, and the lift of her dull-blue blouse at the bosom wove a great restfulness about Peter.  The brooch of old gold glinted at her throat.  The heavy screen of the arbor gave them a sweet sense of privacy.  The conversation meandered this way and that, and became quite secondary to the feeling of the girl’s nearness and sympathy.  Their talk drifted back to Peter’s mission here in Hooker’s Bend, and Cissie was saying: 

“The trouble is, Peter, we are out of our milieu.”  Some portion of Peter’s brain that was not basking in the warmth and invitation of the girl answered quite logically: 

“Yes, but if I could help these people, Cissie, reconstruct our life here culturally—­”

Cissie shook her head.  “Not culturally.”

This opposition shunted more of Peter’s thought to the topic in hand.  He paused interrogatively.

“Racially,” said Cissie.

“Racially?” repeated the man, quite lost.

Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes.  “You know very well, Peter, that you and I are not—­are not anything near full bloods.  You know that racially we don’t belong in—­Niggertown.”

Peter never knew exactly how this extraordinary sentence had come about, but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl were not of Niggertown.  No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter, who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to confusion.  He saw the implications at once.