Like Porgy, Bess had undergone a subtle change that became more evident from day to day. Her gaunt figure had rounded out, bringing back a look of youthful comeliness, and her face was losing its hunted expression. The air of pride that had always shown in her bearing, which had amounted almost to disdain, that had so infuriated the virtuous during her evil days, was heightened, and, in her bettered condition forced a resentful respect from her feminine traducers. One morning while she was doing her marketing on the wharf, one of the river men who had known her in the past, hailed her too familiarly. He was at that moment stepping from the top round of a ladder on to the wharf. “How ’bout ternight?” he asked with a leer. She was holding a string of whiting in her left hand, and was hanging upon the final penny of a bargain with the fishman. She half turned, and delivered a resounding slap with her right hand. The man staggered backward, hung for a moment, then vanished. There was a tremendous splash from the shallow water. “Twenty cent fuh dis string, an’ not one cent mo’,” Bess continued coolly to the fishman. He accepted the price. Bess gave him eighteen cents, and a hard look. He counted the money, glanced at the hand that now hung innocently against her apron, then laughed. “Just as yuh say, Sister. I ain’t quarrelin’ none wid _yuh dis_ mornin’.” Bess gave him one of the faint, cryptic smiles that always made men friends and women enemies for her, and departed for Catfish Row, as if nothing had happened to break the dull routine of the morning’s chores. § Saturday night, and the court had flung off its workaday clothes and mood. In the corner by Serena’s washbench a small intimate circle had gathered about a smoking kerosene lamp. Several women sat on the bench with drowsy little negroes in their laps. A man near the light leaned over a guitar, with a vague wistfulness in his face, and plucked successive chords with a swift, running vibrance of sound. Then a deep baritone hummed for a second and raised an air: “Ain’t it hahd tuh be a nigger; Ain’t it hahd tuh be a nigger; Ain’t it hahd tuh be a nigger; ’Cause yuh can’t git yo’ rights w’en yuh do. “I was sleepin’ on a pile ob lumber, Jus’ as happy as uh man kin be, W’en a w’ite man come wake me from my slumber, An’ he say, ‘Yuh gots tuh work now, ’cause yuh free!’” Then they were all in on the chorus: “Ain’t it hahd tuh be a nigger,” and the gloom hummed with the low, close harmonies. In another corner the crap circle had gathered. Porgy’s delight in the game had not waned with his increasing interests, and he sat fondling the small white cubes, and whispering to them in his old confidential manner. “Little w’ite babies,” he crooned, “come sing fuh dis nigger.” He cast--and won.