“I ought to tell you,” he said--and as he said it, staring out to sea, he was so imposed upon by the importance of the moment to himself that he almost felt as if the sea listened and the waves paused--“I ought to tell you that I have negro blood in my veins.” She was silent. There was a moment before he dared look at her; he could not bear to read his doom in her eyes. But finally he did muster up courage enough to turn his head. The girl was placidly chewing gum and gazing at an excursion vessel that was making a landing at one of the piers. He thought she had not heard. “Mary,” he repeated, “I have negro blood in my veins.” “Uh-huh,” said she. “I gotcha the first time, Steve! Say, I wonder if we couldn't take the boat back to town? Huh? Whatcha say?” He looked at her almost incredulous. She had understood, and yet she had not shrunk away from him! He examined her with a new interest; his personal drama, in which she, perforce, must share, seemed to have made no impression upon her whatsoever. “Do you mean,” he said, hesitatingly, “that it will--that it won't make any difference to you? That you can marry me, that you _will_ marry me, in spite of--of--in spite of what I am?” “Gee! but ain't you the solemn one!” said the girl, taking hold of her gum and “stringing” it out from her lips. “Whatcha s'pose I care for a little thing like that?” He had looked for a sort of dramatic “situation”; and, behold, there was none! There was none simply because the girl had no vantage point from which to look at his life and hers. He had negro blood in his veins--and she simply did not care one way or the other! He felt no elation, no exultation; he believed that she _should_ have cared; whether her love was great enough to pardon that in him or not, she should have felt it as a thing that _needed_ pardon. As he stared at the girl, and she continued to chew her gum, he swiftly and subtly revised his estimate of her; and in his new appraisement there was more than a tinge of disgust. And for a moment he became altogether a white man in his judgment of the thing that was happening; he looked at the situation as a patrician of the South might have looked at it; the seven eighths of his blood which was white spoke: “By God!” he said, suddenly leaping to his feet and flinging aside the startled hand which the girl put out toward him, “I can't have anything to do with a woman who'd marry a nigger!” So Carter went back to Atlanta. And, curiously enough, he stepped from the train almost into the midst of a strange and terrible conflict of which the struggle in his individual breast was, in a sense, the type and the symbol. It was a Saturday night in September, an evening on which there began a memorable and sanguinary massacre of negroes; an event which has been variously explained and analyzed, but of which, perhaps, the underlying causes will never be completely understood.