“Eating out my heart and vitals for you and your confounded highfalutin amen notions.”

“Before you ever clapped eyes on me you was more famous for your arm muscle than your backbone.  I guess I don’t remember how your own mother told me the very day before she died how she tried on her old knees to keep you out of a marriage with that woman.  All that happened way back in the days when you had your muscles and was head rubber-down at Herschey’s.  You knew her kind when you did it, and now why ain’t you man enough to blame yourself for what you are instead of blaming the girl?  Gee!”

“I didn’t mean it, Marj.  It slipped.  S’help me, I didn’t.  Sometimes I just don’t know what I’m saying, Marj; that’s how my mind kinda gets sometimes.  All fuzzed over like.”

“What’s the odds what you say, Blink?  You’re just not man-size, I guess.”

She was a bleak little figure bowing into the wind, her tippet flapping back over one shoulder.

“I ain’t, ain’t I?  I ’ain’t gone through a living hell sitting on the water-wagon for you, have I?”

“Try to keep from twitching that way, Blink.  You give me the horrors.”

“I ’ain’t cut out playing stakes, have I?  Gad!  I can live from Sunday to Sunday on a pick-up from a little gamble here and a little gamble there.  But when you hollered, I didn’t cut it and begin to work up muscle to get back on the job again, did I?  I didn’t, did I?”

“You can’t pump that into me, Blink.”

His voice narrowed to a nasal quality.  “I didn’t send her and the kid a whole Christmas box like you wanted me to, did I?  I didn’t stick a brand-new fiver in the black-silk-dress pattern, knowing all the while she’d have it drunk up before she opened the creases out.  I didn’t, did I?”

They were approaching the intersection of a wide and white-lighted cross-town street.  The snowfall had lightened.  Marjorie Clark let her gaze rest for the moment upon her companion, and her voice seemed suddenly to nestle deep in her throat.

“Gee!  Blink, if I thought any of the—­the uplift stuff I’ve tried to pump into you had seeped in.  Gee! if I could think that, Blink!”

Tears lay close to the surface of her words, and his lean face was thrust farther forward in affirmation.

“It has, Marj.  All I got to do is to think of you and those big black eyes of yours shining, and I could lead a water-wagon parade.”

“It’s the habits, Blink, you got to watch most.  For a minute to-night you looked like coke and—­and it scared me.  Don’t let the coke get you, Blink.  For God’s sake, don’t!”

“I sent her a fiver, Marj, and a black silk, and a doll with real hair for the kid.  Y’oughtta seen, Marj, real hair on it.”

“That was fine, Blink.  Fine!”

“Where you going?  Aw, come, Marj.  For the love of Mike, you’re not going.”

“Yes, yes.  I got to go.  This is Twenty-second Street, my corner.  That’s where I room; that fourth house to the right.  That dark one.  I got to go.”