At first Jason had been lavish, almost with a smack of some of the old days she had known, spending with the easy prodigality of the gambler in luck.  There was a near-seal coat from him in her cupboard of near-silks, and the flimsy wooden walls of her rooms had been freshly papered in roses.

Then his luck had turned, and to top his sparseness with her this new sullenness which she feared and yet which could be so delicious to her—­reminiscently delicious.

She gave him coffee, and he drank it like medicine out of a thick-lipped cup painted in roses.

“My Red-boy blue,” she reiterated, trying to ingratiate her arms about his neck.  “Red-boy tells Winnie he won’t be back for two whole days and then brings her surprise party very next day.  Red-boy can’t stay away from Winnie.”

“Let go.”

“Red-boy bring Winnie nothing?  Not little weeny, weeny nothing?” drawing a design down his coat sleeve, her mouth bunched.

Suddenly he jerked her so that the breath jumped in a warm fan of it against her face.

“You’re the only thing I’ve got in the world, Win.  My luck’s gone, but I’ve got you.  Tell me I’ve got you.”

He could be equally intense over which street car to take, and she knew it, but somehow it lessened for her none of the lure of his nervosity, and with her mind recoiling from his pennilessness her body inclined.

“Tell me, Winnie, that I have you.”

“You know you have,” she said, and smiled, with her head back so that her face foreshortened.

“I’m going far for you Winnie.  Gambling is too rotten—­and too easy.  I want to build bridges for you.  Practice law.  Corner Wall Street.”

This last clicked.

“Once,” she said, lying back, with her pupils enlarging with the fleeting memories she was not always alert enough to clutch—­“once—­once when I lived around Central Park—­a friend of mine—­vice-president he was—­Well, never mind, he was my friend—­it was nothing for him to turn over a thousand or two a week for me in Wall Street.”

This exaggeration was gross, but it could feed the flame of his passion for her like oil.

“I’ll work us up and out of this!  I’ve got better stuff in me.  I want to wind you in pearls—­diamonds—­sapphires.”

“I had a five-thousand-dollar string once—­of star sapphires.”

“Trust me, Winnie.  Help me by having confidence in me.  I’m glad my luck is welching.  It will be lean at first, until I get on my legs.  But it’s not too late yet.  Win, if only I have some one to stand by me.  To believe—­to fight with and for me!  Get me, girl?  Believe in me.”

“Sure.  Always play strong with the cops, Red.  It’s the short cut to ready money.  Ready money, Red.  That’s what gets you there.  Don’t ask any girl to hang on if it’s shy.  That’s where I spun myself dirt many a time, hanging on after it got shy.  Ugh!  That’s what did for me—­hanging on—­after it got shy.”