"All right, I will." He spaced his words with his speculations about the nature of her request. "What do you want me to do?" "I want you to help me go away." Peter looked at her in surprise. He hardly knew what he had been expecting, but it was not this. Some repressed emotion crept into the girl's voice. "Peter, I--I can't stay here in Hooker's Bend any longer. I want to go away. I--I've got to go away." Peter stood regarding her curiously and at the same time sympathetically. "Where do you want to go, Cissie?" The girl drew a long breath; her bosom lifted and dropped abruptly. "I don't know; that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about." "You don't know where you want to go?" He smiled faintly. "How do you know you want to go at all?" "Oh, Peter, all I know is I must leave Hooker's Bend!" She gave a little shiver. "I'm tired of it, sick of it--sick." She exhaled a breath, as if she were indeed physically ill. Her face suggested it; her eyes were shadowed. "Some Northern city, I suppose," she added. "And you want me to help you?" inquired Peter, puzzled. She nodded silently, with a woman's instinct to make a man guess the favor she is seeking. Then it occurred to Peter just what sort of assistance the girl did want. It gave him a faint shock that a girl could come to a man to beg or to borrow money. It was a white man's shock, a notion he had picked up in Boston, because it happens frequently among village negroes, and among them it holds as little significance as children begging one another for bites of apples. Peter thought over his bank balance, then started toward a chest of drawers where he kept his checkbook. "Cissie, if I can he of any service to you in a substantial way, I'll be more than glad to--" She put out a hand and stopped him; then talked on in justification of her determination to go away. "I just can't endure it any longer, Peter." She shuddered again. "I can't stand Niggertown, or this side of town--any of it. They--they have no _feeling_ for a colored girl, Peter, not--not a speck!" She rave a gasp, and after a moment plunged on into her wrongs: "When--when one of us even walks past on the street, they--they whistle and say a-all kinds of things out loud, j-just as if w-we weren't there at all. Th- they don't c-care; we're just n-nigger w-women." Cissie suddenly began sobbing with a faint catching noise, her full bosom shaken by the spasms; her tears slowly welling over. She drew out a handkerchief with a part of its lace edge gone, and wiped her eyes and cheeks, holding the bit of cambric in a ball in her palm, like a negress, instead of in her fingers, like a white woman, as she had been taught. Then she drew a deep breath, swallowed, and became more composed. Peter stood looking in helpless anger at this representative of all women of his race. "Cissie, that's street-corner scum--the dirty sewage--"