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 behalf of the octoroon. Everything the merchants said against negroes became accusations against Cissie in a sharp personal way. “A nigger is a nigger”; “A thief is a thief”; “She wouldn't quit stealing if I paid her a hundred a week.” Every stroke had fallen squarely on Cissie's shoulders. A nigger, a thief; and she would never be otherwise.

It was all so hopeless, so unchangeable, that Peter walked down the bleak street unutterably depressed There was nothing he could do. The situation was static. It seemed best that he should go away North and save his own skin. It was impossible to take Cissie with him. Perhaps in time he would come to forget her, and in so doing he would forget the pauperism and pettinesses of all the black folk of the South. Because through Cissie Peter saw the whole negro race. She was flexuous and passionate, kindly and loving, childish and naïvely wise; on occasion she could falsify and steal, and in the depth of her Peter sensed a profound capacity for fury and violence. For all her precise English, she was untamed, perhaps untamable.

Cissie was a far cry from the sort of woman Peter imagined he wanted for a mate; yet he knew that if he stayed on in Hooker's Bend, seeing her, desiring her, with her luxury mocking the loneliness of the old Renfrew manor, presently he would marry her. Already he had had his little irrational moments when it seemed to him that Cissie herself was quite fine and