"Well, I'll beat it this time. Got to meet a friend o' mine on the Common.... See you some time." He pulled his cap over his eyes, put up his collar and slouched out the door. Wenny sat sipping his beer. He wished Whitey had not gone. His mind was fearfully empty and dark. Why couldn't I do that, bum from town to town? That's the worst that can happen to me anyway, and that sounds fun. That way I can forget her and all this life. Start afresh as if I had just been born. He got to his feet firmly, put his two dollars down beside the cheque and walked out into the street. A sudden wild elation had seized him. He hadn't a cent in the world. What should he do now, reborn without a cent? It was already dark. The wind made his cheeks tingle. Of course he knew what to do. He'd pawn his watch. Down the street a little way three gold balls glinted above a show window in the full glare of an arclight. * * * * His forehead and eyes in the carmine ring of a Ward 8 becoming oval as he tipped it to his mouth, half a slice of orange bobbing in the midst of it, the lemony claret taste in his mouth and excitement shooting in hot and cold shivers through his blood. Opposite a girl's face, cheeks firm under powder giving way suddenly in loose purplish skin under the eyes, hair fuzzy and yellow. Beyond, through blue arabesques of tobacco smoke, tops of instruments from the orchestra playing Goodby, Girls I'm Through, a chromo of George Washington in a gold frame hung with a festoon of red frilled paper. In his mind muddled the towns Whitey had told him about, Akron and Cleveland and Chicago and Atlanta, Georgia, and Tallahassee and Key West, and Fanshaw's delicately intoned voice saying: Like beautiful leanfaced people of the Renaissance lost in their vermillion barge.... Ellen wasn't leanfaced; plump cheeks, plump breasts. He was living now. Now he'd forget how his father looked with his collar round backwards, he'd forget Nan with Ellen, realer than old fool Fanshaw's vermillion barge. "You're one of these college boys, aren't you, dear?" Her tired fingers, overwhite, played nervously with a cigarette box on the table. "Why?" "Cause you keep askin' me my life history. I'm not a fiction magazine. Tellin' stories isn't in my line, see?" "I'm sort of interested in people's life histories today, Ellen. I'm just beginning mine." "I knew I was robbin' the cradle," she said, and laughed, showing to the gums a set of teeth like the teeth in a dentist's showcase. "But I didn't know it was that bad."