The old Captain’s library lacked sincerity.  Southern orthodoxy, which persists in pouring its religious thought into the outworn molds of special creation, lacks sincerity.  Scarcely a department of Southern life escapes this fundamental attitude of special pleader and disingenuousness.  It explains the Southern fondness for legal subtleties.  All attempts at Southern poetry, belles-lettres, painting, novels, bear the stamp of the special plea, of authors whose exposition is careful.

Peter perceived what every one must perceive, that when letters turn into a sort of glorified prospectus of a country, all value as literature ceases.  The very breath of art and interpretation is an eager and sincere searching of the heart.  This sincerity the South lacks.  Her single talent will always be forensic, because she is a lawyer with a cause to defend.  And such is the curse that arises from lynchings and venery and extortions and dehumanizings,—­sterility; a dumbness of soul.

Peter Siner’s thoughts lifted him with the tremendous buoyancy of inspiration.  He swung out of his chair and began tramping his dark room.  The skin of his scalp tickled as if a ghost had risen before him.  The nerves in his thighs and back vibrated.  He felt light, and tingled with energy.

Unaware of what he was doing, he set about lighting the gasolene-lamp.  He worked with nervous quickness, as if he were in a great hurry.  Presently a brilliant light flooded the room.  It turned the gray illumination of the windows to blackness.

Joy enveloped Peter.  His own future developed under his eyes with the same swift clairvoyance that marked his vision of the ills of his country.  He saw himself remedying those ills.  He would go about showing white men and black men the simple truth, the spiritual necessity for justice and fairness.  It was not a question of social equality; it was a question of clearing a road for the development of Southern life.  He would show white men that to weaken, to debase, to dehumanize the negro, inflicted a more terrible wound on the South than would any strength the black man might develop.  He would show black men that to hate the whites, constantly to suspect, constantly to pilfer from them, only riveted heavier shackles on their limbs.

It was all so clear and so simple!  The white South must humanize the black not for the sake of the negro, but for the sake of itself.  No one could resist logic so fundamental.

Peter’s heart sang with the solemn joy of a man who had found his work.  All through his youth he had felt blind yearnings and gropings for he knew not what.  It had driven him with endless travail out of Niggertown, through school and college, and back to Niggertown,—­this untiring Hound of Heaven.  But at last he had reached his work.  He, Peter Siner, a mulatto, with the blood of both white and black in his veins, would come as an evangel of liberty to both white and black.  The brown man’s eyes grew moist from Joy.  His body seemed possessed of tremendous energy.