Hanscha, with her veiny nose and the dreadful single hair growing out of a mole on her chin, was not without her erudition.  She had read for the midwifery, and back in the old days could recite the bones in the body.

She let the boy read nights, sometimes even to dropping another coin into the gas meter.  Some of the books were the lewd penny ones of the Bowery bookstands, old medical treatises, too, purchased three for a quarter and none too nice reading for the growing boy.  But there he had also found a Les Miserables and The Confessions of St. Augustine, which last, if he had known it, was a rare edition, but destined for the ash pit.

Once he read Hanscha a bit of poetry out of a furiously stained old volume of verse, so fragrantly beautiful, to him, this bit, that it wound around him like incense, the perfume of it going deeply and stinging his eyes to tears: 

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting! 
  The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
  Hath had elsewhere its setting,
  And cometh from afar. 
  Not in entire forgetfulness,
  And not in utter nakedness,
  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
  From God, who is our home: 
  Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
  Shades of the prison house begin to close
  Upon the growing boy,
  But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
  He sees it in his joy;
  The youth who daily farther, from the East
  Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
  And by the vision splendid
  Is on his way attended;
  At length the man perceives it die away,
  And fade into the light of common day.

But Hanscha was drunk and threw some coffee-sopped bread at him, and so his foray into poetry ended in the slops of disgust.

A Miss Manners, a society social worker who taught poverty sweet forbearance every Tuesday from four until six, wore a forty-eight-diamond bar pin on her under bodice (on Tuesday from four until six), and whose gray-suede slippers were ever so slightly blackened from the tripping trip from front door to motor and back, took him up, as the saying is, and for two weeks Jason disported himself on the shorn lawns of the Manners summer place at Great Neck, where the surf creamed at the edge of the terrace and the smell of the sea set something beating against his spirit as if it had a thousand imprisoned wings.

There he developed quite a flair for the law books in Judge Manners’s laddered library.  Miss Manners found him there, reading, on stomach and elbows, his heels waving in the air.

Judge Manners talked with him and discovered a legal turn of mind, and there followed some veranda talk of educating and removing him from his environment.  But that very afternoon Jason did a horrid thing.  It was no more than he had seen about him all his life.  Not as much.  He kissed the little pig-tailed daughter of the laundress and pursued her as she ran shrieking to her mother’s apron.  That was all, but his defiant head and the laundress’s chance knowledge of his Juvenile Court record did for him.