Dick was still defiant. "I'm sorry I swore," he said, speaking more quietly, "but it's a swearing subject. And I won't be picked up as meaning what I didn't intend. A man needn't be rotten to know what a woman's like. And the nigger women are all the same. They don't understand what it means to be pure. And I tell you, the men are worse. Why, every white woman down South's afraid of them. And good reason, too. It ain't safe for them to go out alone at night. Some places it ain't hardly safe day or night. If we didn't string up a black buck every now and then for an example, we'd never be safe. They're a bad lot, the whole crew of them, and they're getting more blasted impertinent every day." He brought his fist down again and faced them all, his mouth set in its narrow, ugly line, his eyes hard as steel. Miss Wood smiled over at Hertha. "I'm glad you don't agree," she said. She was genuinely interested in the subject, and she also rejoiced in showing Richard Brown at a disadvantage. It was her earnest hope that he would not win so attractive a girl as Hertha for his wife. "No!" said Hertha, "I don't agree." She was close to tears. Unless she told her whole story, nothing that she might say about the Negroes would count, and she was not prepared to tell her story. But her heart was hot with anger, and turning to Dick for the first time in the discussion she cried out, "What do you know about it? You're nothing but a cheap Georgia cracker!" and with this retort rose from the table and hurried to her room. "Dick, how could you?" Mrs. Pickens asked when the two were left alone together. "I didn't begin it," he said again. "No, but you certainly went on with it. How can you expect a girl like Hertha to like you when you talk so coarsely and say such terrible things? She was right, anyway; I'm a southerner and I don't believe such a sweeping statement as that." "Well, I do," said Dick emphatically, back at the dispute again. "I'm not a nigger lover." He wiped his face with his handkerchief and, getting up, began to pace the room. "That stiff old maid with her darned talk makes me want to kill somebody." He stopped in front of Mrs. Pickens and took up the subject again. "Haven't I known the niggers? They worked my father's land, when they didn't loaf and get drunk. Pure women! Every mother's child with a different father! I know 'em. Ain't I seen 'em, the splay-footed, stinking devils!" Mrs. Pickens looked at him, surprised at the intensity of his feeling. She had taken the black people all her life as a matter of course, accepting their failings and shortcomings, never questioning their inferiority, but also never questioning their good qualities and their value in the world in which she was reared. "I think you ought not to talk that way about any human being," she said gently, "and on Sunday, too." "They ain't human," Dick declared, and then added sulkily, "anyway not more than half human."