'Hadn't you better tell me? Did anything happen afterward? Has the girl got--well, a real hold on you?' The head moved slowly sidewise. 'We fought afterward, all the way home. Rowed. Jawed at each other like a pair of little muckers. No, it isn't that. I hated her all the time. I told her I was through with her. She tried to catch me in the hall this morning, up on the third floor. Came sneaking to my room again. With towels. That's why I wrote in the library.' 'But you aren't telling me what the rest of it was.' 'She--oh, she drank beer, and----' 'That's what most everybody does at Hoffmann's. The beer's good there.' 'I don't know. I don't like the stuff.' 'Come, Hen, tell me. Or drop it. Either.' 'I'll tell you. But I get so mad. It's--she--well, she wore pants.' Humphrey's sympathy and interest were real, and he did not smile as he queried: 'Bloomers?' 'No, pants. Britches. I never saw anything so tight. Nothing else like 'em in the whole place. People nudged each other and laughed and said things, right out loud. Hump, it was terrible. And we walked clear through--past hundreds of tables--and away over in the corner--and there were the Ameses, and Martha, and----' His head was up now; there was fire in his eyes; his voice trembled with the passion of a profound moral indignation. 'Hump, she's tough. She rides with that crowd from Pennyweather Point. She smokes cigarettes. She--she leads a double life.' And neither did it occur to Humphrey, looking at the blazing youth before him, to smile at that last remark. Humphrey had reached a point of real concern over Henry. He thought about him the last thing that night--pictured him living a lonely, spasmodically ascetic life, in the not over cheerful boarding-house of Mrs Wilcox--and the first thing the next morning. The curious revelation of the later morning nettled him, perhaps, as a responsible editor, but, if anything, deepened his concern. He had the boy on his conscience, that was the size of it. He thought him over all the morning, before and after the revelation. After it he smoked steadily and hard, and knit his brows, and shook his head gravely, and chuckled. Henry always came in between half-past eleven and twelve Saturdays to clip his contributions from the paper and paste them, end to end, in a 'string.' Then Humphrey would measure the string with a two-foot rule and fill out an order on the _Voice_ Company for payment at the rate of a dollar and a quarter a column, or something less than seven cents an inch. Henry despairing of a raise from nine dollars a week had, months back, elected to work 'on space.' That the result had not been altogether happy--he was averaging something less than nine dollars a week now--does not concern us here. Humphrey contrived to keep busy until the string was made and measured; then proposed lunch. At Stanley's, the food ordered, he leaned on his lank elbows and surveyed the dejected young man before him.