At six o’clock that evening, with a five-dollar bill of which he made a spitball for the judge’s departing figure down the station platform, he was shipped back to Hanscha.  Secretly he was relieved.  Life was easier in the tenement under the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge.  The piece of its arch which he could see from his window was even beautiful, a curve of a stone into some beyond.

That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet, sighing out satisfaction.

Environment had won him back.

On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled passions of rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it.  She had been drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand Street, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharer of spoils.

The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him came out redly in her bloodshot eyes.

In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forged ahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers.  He was plunging eagerly—­brilliantly, in fact—­into a rapid translation of the Iliad, fired from the very first line by the epic of the hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against the working papers.

But to Hanscha they came with the inevitability of a summons rather than an alternative, and so for a year or two he brought home rather precocious wages from his speed in a canning factory.  Then he stoked his way to Sydney and back, returning fiery with new and terrible oaths.

One night Hanscha died.  He found her crumpled up in the huddle of her skirts as if she had dropped in her tracks, which she had, in one of the epileptic heart strictures.

It was hardly a grief to him.  He had seen red with passion at her atrociousness too often, and, somehow, everything that she stood for had been part of the ache in him.

Yet it is doubtful if, released of her, he found better pasture.  Bigger pastures, it is true, in what might be called an upper stratum of the lower East Side, although at no time was he ever to become party to any of its underground system of crime.

Inevitably, the challenge of his personality cleared the way for him.  At nineteen he had won and lost the small fortune of thirty-three hundred dollars at a third-class gambling resort where he came in time to be croupier.

He dressed flashily, wore soft collars, was constantly swapping sporty scarfpins for sportier ones, and was inevitably the center, seldom part, of a group.

Then one evening at Cooper Union, which stands at the head of the Bowery, he enrolled for an evening course in law, but never entered the place again.

Because the next night, in a Fourteenth Street cabaret with adjacent gambling rooms, he met one who called herself Winnie Ross, the beginning of a heart-sickening end.