or two he brought home rather
precocious wages from his speed in a canning factory. Then he stoked his
way to Sydney and back, returning fiery with new and terrible oaths.

One night Hanscha died. He found her crumpled up in the huddle of her
skirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of the
epileptic heart strictures.

It was hardly a grief to him. He had seen red with passion at her
atrociousness too often, and, somehow, everything that she stood for had
been part of the ache in him.

Yet it is doubtful if, released of her, he found better pasture. Bigger
pastures, it is true, in what might be called an upper stratum of the
lower East Side, although at no time was he ever to become party to any
of its underground system of crime.

Inevitably, the challenge of his personality cleared the way for him. At
nineteen he had won and lost the small fortune of thirty-three hundred
dollars at a third-class gambling resort where he came in time to be
croupier.

He dressed flashily, wore soft collars, was constantly swapping sporty
scarfpins for sportier ones, and was inevitably the center, seldom part,
of a group.

Then one evening at Cooper Union, which stands at the head of the
Bowery, he enrolled for an evening course in law, but never entered the
place again.

Because the next night, in a Fourteenth Street cabaret with adjacent
gambling rooms, he met one who called herself Winnie Ross, the beginning
of a heart-sickening end.

There is so little about her to relate. She was the color of cloyed
honey when the sugar granules begin to show through. Pale, pimply in a
fashion the powder could cover up, the sag of her facial muscles showed
plainly through, as if weary of doling out to the years their hush
money, and she was quite obviously down at the heels. Literally so,
because when she took them off, her shoes lopped to the sides and could
not stand for tipsiness.

She was Jason's first woman. She exhaled a perfume, cheap, tickling,
chewed some advertised tablets that scented her kisses, and her throat,
when she threw up her head, had an arch and flex to it that were
mysteriously graceful.

Life had been swift and sheer with Winnie. She was very tired and,
paradoxically enough, it gave her one of her last remaining charms. Her
eyelids were freighted with weariness, were waxy white of it, and they
could flutter to her cheeks, like white butterflies against white, and
lay shadows there that mad