d-mine."

He laughed, then went on seriously. "I didn't have the chance to grow up
learning things gradually. There was no dividing-line between vice and
virtue, all of it spread out there, street behind street, in a glow of
abandoned riot. Even virtue flashed with a loose frankness that deceived
a growing boy. It was a grand drama. Fifty thousand mad men and women!"

She looked at him in amazement. This was something beyond her knowledge.
What was it all that he was talking about?

"There was Josey; she didn't know. I didn't. We saw love played with in
hilarious open passion. We thought it was the thing to do. Children
oughtn't to see it quite that way."

Claire felt guilty, but he stopped and when he began again he was on a
different line of old memories.

"Why, when I sold papers down on the main street I could see the girls
of the district standing around, one block below, in their business
regalia. I thought at first they were angels."

Claire sat in wonder and listened.

"The first time I ever went down there I was eight. Eight years old, and
one of them called me from the open door of her house. When I stepped to
the door, she was coming down a stairway, her white dress open and
spread like wings at either side of her naked body. I was sure she was
an angel out of my Sunday-school book. I could scarcely take the dime
she gave me. I never forgot her kissing me and patting my head when I
stared so at her."

Claire felt a strangely tender pity for the little chap she was seeing
now in her imagination.

"And the fighting, dirty, freckled sons of those women--they kept me
hard at it, keeping the money I got. After that day, I went down there
often. Traded a paper with a golden-haired angel for a box of
cigarettes, the first I ever owned. It was great, wonderful, to have her
cigarettes. I smoked them with a sense of reverence.

"Wright and I played hooky, and the girls hid us all day in their
shacks, played with us, teased us about sex, and taught us things we
oughtn't to have known. Poor old Wright! They sent him to the pen for
burglary after I had been gone years and was blind. I wonder if I'd have
followed him. Most likely would.

"And, oh, the hills! There was old Pisga, pined to its cone point, and a
race-track, with a saloon, at its foot. I ran away out there once at a
big Fourth of July barbecue. It rained like the devil and I lounged in
the bar with jockeys and sporting girls, listening to their ri