“No.  No.  You don’t understand.  For God’s sake try to get me, Winnie.  Fight up with me.  It’ll be lean, starting, but I’ll finish strong for you.”

“Don’t lean on me.  I’m no wailing wall.  What’s it to me all your highfaluting talk.  You’ve been as slab-sided in the pockets as a cat all month.  Don’t have to stand it.  I’ve got friends—­spenders—­”

There had been atrocious scenes, based on his jealousies of her, which some imp in her would lead her to provoke, notwithstanding that even as she spoke she regretted, and reached back for the words,

“I mean—­”

“I know what you mean,” he said, quietly, permitting her to lie back against him and baring his teeth down at her.

She actually thought he was smiling.

“I’m not a dead one by a long shot,” she said, kindling with what was probably her desire to excite him.

“No?”

“No.  I can still have the best.  The very best.  If you want to know it, a political Indian with a car as long as this room, not mentioning any names, is after me—­”

She still harbored the unfortunate delusion that he was smiling.

“You thought I was up at Ossining this morning, didn’t you?” he asked, lazily for him.  He went there occasionally to visit a friend in the state prison who had once served him well in a gambling raid and was now doing a short larceny term there.

“You said you were—­”

“I said I was.  Yes.  But I came back unexpectedly, didn’t I?”

“Y-yes, Red?”

“Look at me!”

She raised round and ready-to-be-terrified eyes.

“Murphy was here last night!” he cracked at her, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, like so many pistol shots.

“Why, Red—­I—­You—­”

“Don’t lie.  Murphy was here last night!  I saw him leave this morning as I came in.”

It was hazard, pure and simple.  Not even a wild one, because all too easily he could kiss down what would be sure to be only her half-flattered resentment.

But there was a cigar stub on the table edge, and certain of her adjustments of the room when he entered had been rather quick.  He could be like that with her, crazily the slave of who knows what beauty he found in her; jealous of even an unaccountable inflection in her voice.  There had been unmentionable frenzies of elemental anger between them and she feared and exulted in these strange poles of his nature.

“Murphy was here last night!”

It had happened, in spite of a caution worthy of a finer finesse than hers, and suddenly she seemed to realize the quality of her fear for him to whom she was everything and who to her was not all.

“Don’t, Red,” she said, all the bars of her pretense down and dodging from his eyes rather than from any move he made toward her.  “Don’t, Red.  Don’t!” And began to whimper in the unbeautifulness of fear, becoming strangely smaller as her pallor mounted.