In some measure it was the old obvious outcry against the conquest of weak and simple peoples. Or the situation at the start indicated something of the sort. But the story that grew out of the situation was less obvious. Indeed, developed by Peter, with his theatrical skill, out of Zanin's raw anarchism, it was a drama of quality and power. Zanin had been able to make nothing more out of it than a clash of social theories. Peter had made it a clash of persons; and through the deliberate development of this clash ran, steadily increasing in poignancy and tragic force straight to the climax of assassination, the story of a girl. Peter himself did not know how good it was. Not until he read about it in the papers (after which he became rather irritatingly complacent regarding it). For you will remember, Peter was crazily pursuing that girl when he wrote it. And the girl was boldly, wonderfully Sue--a level-eyed, outspoken young woman, confronting life; ashamed of nothing, not her body, not her soul; dreaming beautifully of freedom, of expressing herself, of living her life, vibrant with health, courage, joy. The girl, you know, fell in love with a young sailor and gave herself proudly and freely. The sailor could not comprehend her, became furtive and jealous. They quarreled. To quiet her he was driven to brutality. For he was a respectable man and held his reputation high. The affair became known. The men of the ship, muttering strange words about a custom called marriage, held her as bad, fell on the age-old decision that she must continue to be, bad, at their call, though furtively. For they were all respectable men. Then we saw the girl as an outcast, fed, for a time, secretly by the cowed bewildered tribe. We saw her as a dishonored mother, fighting the sea, the forest, the very air for sustenance. We caught glimpses of the new community, growing into a settlement of some stability, the native men forced into the less wholesome labor, then wives and daughters taken and poisoned with this strange philosophy of life. Then we saw our girl, her child toddling at her heels, creeping back into the society where trade and politics, hard liquor (distilled now from the native grain), that holy book of mysterious spell, the firearms and an impenetrable respectability reigned in apparent security over smoldering fires. And finally we saw the girl, not at all a penitent, but a proud inspired creature of instinct, fan those fires until they purged the taint of sophistication from each slumbering native soul and drove a half-mad people at the desperate job of extermination and of reasserting itself as a people on the old lawlessly happy footing. They burned the hogsheads of liquor, the firearms, the heap of holy books, on one great bonfire. I am not doing it justice. But this much will serve to recall the story.