The thing was grotesque. Peter began a sudden shuddering in the cold. Then he began moving toward the empty cabin where he slept and kept his things. He moved along, talking to himself in the dusty emptiness of the crescent. He decided that he would go home, pack his clothes, and vanish. A St. Louis boat would be down that night, and he would just have time to pack his clothes and catch it. He would not take his books, his philosophies. He would let them remain, in the newspapered room, until all crumbled into uniform philosophic dust, and the teachings of Aristotle blew about Niggertown.
Then, as he thought of traveling North, the vision of the honeymoon he had just planned revived his numb brain into a dismal aching. He looked back through the dusk at the Dildine roof. It stood black against an opalescent sky. Out of the foreground, bending over it, arose a clump of tall sunflowers, in whose silhouette hung a suggestion of yellow and green. The whole scene quivered slightly at every throb of his heart. He thought what a fool he was to allow a picaresque past to keep him away from such a woman, how easy it would be to go back to the soft luxury of Cissie, to tell her it made no difference; and somehow, just at that moment it seemed not to.
Then the point of view which Peter had been four years acquiring swept away the impulse, and it left him moving toward his cabin again, empty, cold, and planless.
