He slunk back and forth before the door, showing his teeth, and impotently glaring at the panels. Then he went noisily down the stairs. Outside, he kept shifting uneasily around the low stoop with his wolflike tread, keeping his glance fixed on the entrance with a snarl fixed in his face; yet half afraid; for suddenly he veered off across the roadway, with his head over his shoulder. He entered a lunch-room opposite, and ordering a cup of coffee, brought it back to the window where he could still watch the entrance to the tenement house. Presently a man came out. Joe had never seen the man, but by his furtive air he knew it was the man he was waiting for. Joe, drawing behind the window frame, watched him, snarling, and profoundly indifferent. Leaving the coffee, he went back across the street. In the comfortable, clean, ugly room, with a double bed across the front, and a gas-cooker, sink and icebox at the back, Jewel was waiting for him, wrapped in a pink, quilted silk coat, which was beginning to reveal its cotton stuffing. She stood motionless in the center of the floor, dusky, solid, significantly shapeless, like a piece of sculpture beginning to emerge from the stone. “What the hell . . . !” began Joe angrily. “A nice thing . . . !” “Aah!” she said, moving slightly. “You don’t own me!” “You don’t have to have them now!” he cried. “Sure, I don’t have to have them. But I _can_ have them, if I want.” Joe, cursing, flung his mackintosh on the sofa. Like a wolf, he snarled obliquely. “If you’d let me know when you were coming . . .” she suggested. “Aah!” he snarled. “That would spoil it. I like to come on the impulse. . . . And you like me to.” “Sure, I do,” she said with a slow smile. “But you can’t blame me, if you find me engaged.” “Damnation!” cried Joe, flinging back and forth across the room with his soft tread. “Oh, damnation! I might as well go, now!” Jewel shrugged. She moved portentously to the foot of the bed, where she could look out of the second window. She knew quite well he had no intention of going. Looking out of the window, she waited calmly for him to work off the burden of his ill-temper. “I don’t see why you wont let me hire you a decent place up-town,” he cried. “Yer on’y tahkin’,” she said. “You ought to know by this time I’ll never take anything off you. Why, you fool, it’s on’y because you got no strings on me that you’re still wild about coming here!” “How about you?” She gave him her slow creased smile over a shoulder. “Well, if I ever git enough of you, I’ll let you give me a hundred thousand.” “But this room!” he grumbled. “On the level . . . !” “Suits me!” she said. “I wouldn’t change it for the Waldorf Astoria. I fixed my bed so’s I could lie in it all day if I wanted, and look into the street.” “That’s why you’re so fat,” said Joe. “Gee! you’re fat!” “Well, they tell me you can’t get too much of a good thing,” she said good-humoredly.