dened Jason.

She called him Red, although all that remained now were the lights
through his browning hair, almost like the flashings of a lantern down a
railroad track.

She pronounced it with a slight trilling of the R, and if it was left in
her of half a hundred loves to stir on this swift descent of her life
line, she did over Jason. Partly because he was his winged-Hermes self,
and partly because--because--it was difficult for her rather fagged
brain to rummage back.

Thus the rest may be told:

Entering her rooms one morning, a pair of furiously garish ones over a
musical-instrument store on the Bowery, he threw himself full length on
the red-cotton divan, arms locked under his always angry-looking head,
and watching her, through low lids, trail about the room at the business
of preparing him a surlily demanded cup of coffee. Her none too
immaculate pink robe trailed a cotton-lace tail irritatingly about her
heels, which slip-slopped as she walked, her stockings, without benefit
of support, twisting about her ankles.

She was barometer for his moods, which were elemental, and had learned
to tremble with a queer exaltation of fear before them.

"My Red-boy blue to-day," she said, stooping as she passed and wanting
to kiss him.

He let his lids drop and would have none of her. They were curiously
blue, she thought, as if of unutterable fatigue, and then quickly
appraised that his luck was still letting him in for the walloping now
of two weeks' duration. His diamond-and-opal scarfpin was gone, and the
gold cuff links replaced with mother-of-pearl.

She could be violently bitter about money, and when the flame of his
personality was not there to be reckoned with, ten times a day she
ejected him, with a venom that was a psychosis, out of her further
toleration. Not so far gone was Winnie but that she could count on the
twist of her body and the arch of her throat as revenue getters.

At first Jason had been lavish, almost with a smack of some of the old
days she had known, spending with the easy prodigality of the gambler in
luck. There was a near-seal coat from him in her cupboard of near-silks,
and the flimsy wooden walls of her rooms had been freshly papered in
roses.

Then his luck had turned, and to top his sparseness with her this new
sullenness which she feared and yet which could be so delicious to
her--reminiscently delicious.

She gave him coffee, and he drank it like medicine out of a thick-li