le like
him behind bars, where they can't make asses of themselves. Yet each
year, and every day and every hour, a new ninny is born who fancies
he's cleverer than all his predecessors put together. Talk about
suckers! Why, they're giants of intellect compared to the mentally
lop-sided that five thousand years of experience can't teach. When the
criminal-clown's turn comes, he hops, skips and jumps into the ring
with the old, old gag. He thinks it's new, because he himself is so
fresh and green. 'Here I am again,' he yells, 'the fellow that'll do
you up. Others have tried it. They're dead in jail or under
jail-yards. But me--just watch me!' We do, and after a little we put
him with his mates and a keeper in a barred kindergarten where fools
that can't learn, little moral cripples of both sexes, my dear, belong.
Bah!" He puffed out the smoke, throwing his head back, in a cloud
toward the ceiling.

I sprang from my seat and faced him. I was tingling all through. I
didn't care a rap what became of me for just that minute. I forgot
about Tom. I prayed that the cop wouldn't come for a minute yet--but
only that I might answer him.

"You're mighty smart, ain't you? You can sit back here and sneer at
me, can't you? And feel so big and smart and triumphant! What've you
done but catch a girl at her first bungling job! It makes you feel
awfully cocky, don't it? 'What a big man am I!' Bah!" I blew the
smoke up toward the ceiling from my mouth, with just that satisfied
gall that he had had; or rather, I pretended to. He let down the front
legs of his chair and began to stare at me.

"And you don't know it all, Mr. Manager, not you. Your clown-criminal
don't jump into the ring because he's so full of fun he can't stay out.
He goes in for the same reason the real clown does--because he gets
hungry and thirsty and sleepy and tired like other men, and he's got to
fill his stomach and cover his back and get a place to sleep. And it's
because your kind gets too much, that my kind gets so little it has to
piece it out with this sort of thing. No, you don't know it quite all.

"There's a girl named Nancy Olden that could tell you a lot, smart as
you are. She could show you the inside of the Cruelty, where she was
put so young she never knew that children had mothers and fathers, till
a red-haired girl named Mag Monahan told her; and then she was mighty
glad she hadn't any. She thought that all little girls were bl