The lodger looked down at the naked chop bone in his hand.  The juicy, broiled meat was comforting to his outraged stomach.  Meat.  The word stood out in his mind to be instantly followed by that other word that, for him, had spelled ruin, made him a ragged panhandler, reduced him to living among the poorest and most hopeless.  Drink!  He raised his head and eyed Cake with crafty calculation.

“What will you pay me for such teaching?” he demanded, and looked down again at the bone.

What he did in the end, Cake herself was satisfied came to him afterward.  At first he was actuated only by the desire to procure food and drink—­more especially the drink—­at the cost of the least possible effort to himself.

Cake saw the look, and she knew.  She even smiled a little in the greatness of her relief.  She saw she had been right to bring the chop, and appreciated that her progress along road to fame would be as slow or fast as she could procure food for him in lesser or larger quantities.

“I’ll bring you eats,” she said cunningly.  “From Maverick’s,” she added.  By which she meant the eats would be “has-is”—­distinctly second class, quite possibly third.

The lodger nodded.  “And booze,” he put in, watching her face.

“And booze,” Cake assented.

So the bargain was struck in a way that worked the most cruel hardship on the girl.  Food she could steal and did, blithely enough, since she had no monitor but the lure of brightness and that Thing within her breast that hotly justified the theft and only urged her on.  But booze was a very different proposition.  It was impossible to steal booze—­even a little.  To secure booze she was forced to offer money.  Now what money Cake earned at Maverick’s her mother snatched from her hand before she was well within the door.  If she held out even a dime, she got a beating.  And Cake’s mother, in the later years of her life, besides being a clever evader of the police and the truant officer, developed into a beater of parts.  Broken food the child offered in abundance and piteous hope.  But the lodger was brutally indifferent.

“Food,” he scoffed.  “Why, it says in the Bible—­you never heard of the Bible, hey?” Cake shook her tangled head.

“No?  Well, it’s quite a Book,” commented the lodger.  He had been fortunate that day and was, for him, fairly intoxicated.  “And it says right in there—­and some consider that Book an authority—­man cannot live by food alone.  Drink—­I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion—­Don’t you know what drink is, alley-cat?  Very well, then, wine is wont to show the mind of man, and you won’t see mine until you bring me booze.  Get out!”

And Cake got out.  Also, being well versed in a very horrid wisdom, she took the food with her.  This was hardly what the lodger had expected, and I think what respect he was capable of sprouted for her then.