a certain
farouche air, he had been attractive, especially to women. Clever,
alert, and sensitive, brought up in a Bohemian set, without money, or
morals, or the steadying factor of position, he had early acquired all
the tricks of the artist, the parasite, and the adventurer. He could
play the guitar quite prettily, could sing a song, dabbled with pen and
brush, and talked with considerable facility of poetry and art.

An old-time admirer of his mother's, on whom that lady when dying had
fathered the boy, paid for the lad's keep as a child. Later, attracted
by the boy's beauty, and secretly proud of his putative share in it, he
had sent him to a college in a south coast watering place and afterward
to Oxford.

There Joses had swiftly worked his way into a vicious set of stupid rich
men, morally his equals, intellectually his inferiors, but socially and
economically vastly his superiors. They were all lads from public
schools who desired above all to be thought men of the world. Joses, on
the other hand, was a man of the world who desired above all else to be
taken for a public-school man.

Each of the two parties to the unwritten contract got what was desired
from the other. Joses had knocked about the Continent; he knew the
Quartier Latin, Berlin night-life, and the darker haunts of Naples. His
rich allies kept horses, hunted, and raced. They learned a good deal
that Joses was ready to impart; and on his side he acquired from them
some knowledge of the racing world and an entree into it. His manners
were good--rather too good; and the touch of the artist and the exotic
appealed to the coarse and simple minds of his companions. He wore
longish hair, softish collars, cultivated eccentricities and a slightly
foreign accent; all of which things the _jeunesse doree_ tolerated with
a touch of patronage. And Joses was quite content to be patronized so
long as his patrons would pay.

After two years at Oxford his putative father died. Joses went down
perforce, leaving behind him many debts, a girl behind a bar who was
fond of him, and a reputation as a brilliant rogue who might some day
prove the poet of the sport of kings.

Equipped with the knowledge acquired at the ancient University, he went
to London and there earned his living as a sporting journalist,
attending race-meetings, adding to his income by betting, and performing
certain unlovely services for the more vicious of his Oxford friends.

Handicapped in many