on disported himself on
the shorn lawns of the Manners summer place at Great Neck, where the
surf creamed at the edge of the terrace and the smell of the sea set
something beating against his spirit as if it had a thousand imprisoned
wings.

There he developed quite a flair for the law books in Judge Manners's
laddered library. Miss Manners found him there, reading, on stomach and
elbows, his heels waving in the air.

Judge Manners talked with him and discovered a legal turn of mind, and
there followed some veranda talk of educating and removing him from his
environment. But that very afternoon Jason did a horrid thing. It was no
more than he had seen about him all his life. Not as much. He kissed the
little pig-tailed daughter of the laundress and pursued her as she ran
shrieking to her mother's apron. That was all, but his defiant head and
the laundress's chance knowledge of his Juvenile Court record did for
him.

At six o'clock that evening, with a five-dollar bill of which he made a
spitball for the judge's departing figure down the station platform, he
was shipped back to Hanscha. Secretly he was relieved. Life was easier
in the tenement under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. The piece of its
arch which he could see from his window was even beautiful, a curve of a
stone into some beyond.

That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet,
sighing out satisfaction.

Environment had won him back.

On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled passions of
rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge
of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been
drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness
that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand
Street, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharer
of spoils.

The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him came
out redly in her bloodshot eyes.

In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forged
ahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers. He
was plunging eagerly--brilliantly, in fact--into a rapid translation
of the _Iliad_, fired from the very first line by the epic of the
hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against the
working papers.

But to Hanscha they came with the inevitability of a summons rather
than an alternative, and so for a year