"You should know, Herby," she says sort of laughing; "with your experience you should know if anybody does." Then he laughs, too, a kind of a low and meaning chuckle, and they goes to talking about something else. But I has done heard enough to set me to studying mighty earnest. Neither one of 'em ain't specifying who they means by "he" and "she" but I can guess. Once more I says to myself, I says: "_Uh huh, uh huh!_" CHAPTER VIII _Dark Secrets_ Some of the folks which has been following our experiences, as I has wrote them down, might think it was my bounden duty to go straight-away to Mr. Dallas and promulgate to him these here remarks which I hears pass betwixt Mr. H. C. Raynor and the permanent-wavy lady on that Sunday night six weeks ago, coming back from our week-end in the country. But I does not by no means see my way clear to doing so. In the first place, I ain't never been what you might call a professional promulgator. In the second place, I figures the time ain't ripe to start in telling what I believes and what I suspicions. In the third place, I don't know yet if it ever will be ripe. Some white folks, seems like, is just naturally beset with a craving to bust into colored folkses' business and try for to run their personal affairs for 'em. Mr. Dallas, he is not gaited that way in no particular whatsoever; him having been born and raised South and naturally knowing better anyhow; but some I might mention is. Still, and even so, most white folks don't care deeply for anybody at all, much less it's somebody which is colored, to be telling 'em onpleasant and onwelcome tidings. And he is white and I is black--and there you is! Another way I looks at it is this way: There's a whole heap of white folks, mainly Northerners, which thinks that because us black folks talks loud and laughs a-plenty in public that we ain't got no secret feelings of our own; they thinks we is ready and willing at all times to just blab all we knows into the first white ear that passes by. Which I reckon that is one of the most monstrous mistakes in natural history that ever was. You take a black boy which he working for a white family. Being on close relations that-a-way with 'em he's bound to know everything they does--what they is thinking about, what-all they hopes and what-all they fears. But does they, for their part, know anything about how he acts amongst his own race? I'll say contrary! They maybe might think they knows but you take it from J. Poindexter they positively does not do nothing of the kind. All what they gleans about him--his real inside emotions, I means--is exactly what he's willing for 'em to glean; that and no more. And usually that ain't so much.