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 maddened 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.