“Where?”

“Where do you s’pose?  Home.”

“What’s doin’ there?”

“N-nothing.”

“Whatta you going to do Christmas Eve?  Sit in your two-by-four and twiddle your thumbs?”

Immediate sobs rose in her throat.  “Lord!” she said, “I dun’no’!  I dun’no’!”

He set up the jangling again.  “It’s Christmas Eve, Marj.”

“That’s right, rub it in,” and looked away from him.

“Come, Marj, don’t leave me high and dry like this.  Come, I’ll blow you to a little supper, kiddo.  I got a couple of meal tickets coming to me down at Harry’s on some ivories I threw last night.”

“Dice!  And after the line of talk you just tried to make me swallow.  Did I believe it?  I did not!”

“No stakes, Marj.  Just for a couple of meal tickets we tossed.  Come, girl, you ’ain’t been down to Harry’s for months; you won’t get your halo mussed from one time.  It’s Christmas Eve, Marj.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“If I got to go it alone to-night, Marj, it’ll be the wettest Christmas I ever spent, it will.  I’ll pickle this Christmas Eve like it was never pickled before, I will.”

“Aren’t you no man at all, threatening like that?  Just no man at all?”

“I tell you if I got to go it alone to-night, I won’t be.  I’m crazy enough to tear things wide open.”

“A line of talk like that will send me home quicker than anything, if you want to know it.”  She turned her face away and toward the dark aisle of the side street.

“I didn’t mean it, Marj.”

“I hate whining.”

“Don’t go, girl.  Don’t.  Don’t give me the horrors and leave me alone to-night, Marj.”

She moved slowly into the gloom of the cross-town street.  Solemn rows of blank-faced houses flanked it.  Wind slewed as through a canon, whistling in high pitch.

“Gee!”

“Fine little joy lane for your Christmas Eve, eh?  Don’t go, Marj.  Have a heart and be a sport.  Let me blow you to a supper down at Harry’s for old times’ sake.  Didn’t you promise my old woman to keep an eye on me?  Didn’t you?  For old times’ sake, Marj.  It’s Christmas.”

She stood shivering and gazing down into the black throat of the street.

“It’ll be a merry evening in that two-by-four of yours, won’t it?  Look at it down there.  Cheerful, ain’t it?”

Tears formed in a glaze over her eyes.

“Be a sport, Marj.”

“All right—­Blink!”

* * * * *

At the family entrance to Harry’s place, and just around the corner from the main entrance of knee-high swinging doors and a broadside of frosted plate-glass front, a bead of gas burned sullenly through a red globe, winking, so to speak, at all who would enter there under cover of its murk.

Women with faces the fatty white of jade, and lips that might have kissed blood, slipped from the dark tide of the side street into the entrance.  Furtive couples rose out of the night:  the men, lean as laths, collars turned up and caps drawn down; girls, some with red lights and some with no lights in their eyes, and most of them with too red lips of too few curves, and all of them with chalk-colored powder laid on over the golden pollen of youth.