Many patterns of carpet lay rolled out before them
on the floor—two of Brussels showed the
beginning of their quest, and its ending in that direction;
while a score of ingrains lured their eyes and prolonged
the debate between desire pocket-book. The head
of the department did them the honor of waiting upon
them himself—or did Joe the honor, as she
well knew, for she had noted the open-mouthed awe
of the elevator boy who brought them up. Nor
had she been blind to the marked respect shown Joe
by the urchins and groups of young fellows on corners,
when she walked with him in their own neighborhood
down at the west end of the town.
But the head of the department was called away to
the telephone, and in her mind the splendid promise
of the carpets and the irk of the pocket-book were
thrust aside by a greater doubt and anxiety.
“But I don’t see what you find to like
in it, Joe,” she said softly, the note of insistence
in her words betraying recent and unsatisfactory discussion.
For a fleeting moment a shadow darkened his boyish
face, to be replaced by the glow of tenderness.
He was only a boy, as she was only a girl—two
young things on the threshold of life, house-renting
and buying carpets together.
“What’s the good of worrying?” he
questioned. “It’s the last go, the
very last.”
He smiled at her, but she saw on his lips the unconscious
and all but breathed sigh of renunciation, and with
the instinctive monopoly of woman for her mate, she
feared this thing she did not understand and which
gripped his life so strongly.
“You know the go with O’Neil cleared the
last payment on mother’s house,” he went
on. “And that’s off my mind.
Now this last with Ponta will give me a hundred dollars
in bank—an even hundred, that’s the
purse—for you and me to start on, a nest-egg.”
She disregarded the money appeal. “But
you like it, this—this ‘game’
you call it. Why?”
He lacked speech-expression. He expressed himself
with his hands, at his work, and with his body and
the play of his muscles in the squared ring; but to
tell with his own lips the charm of the squared ring
was beyond him. Yet he essayed, and haltingly
at first, to express what he felt and analyzed when
playing the Game at the supreme summit of existence.
“All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good
in the ring when you’ve got the man where you
want him, when he’s had a punch up both sleeves
waiting for you and you’ve never given him an
opening to land ’em, when you’ve landed
your own little punch an’ he’s goin’
groggy, an’ holdin’ on, an’ the
referee’s dragging him off so’s you can
go in an’ finish ‘m, an’ all the
house is shouting an’ tearin’ itself loose,
an’ you know you’re the best man, an’
that you played m’ fair an’ won out because
you’re the best man. I tell you—”
