Dunstan heard the squeaking voice in silence. The afternoon had been long and hot. Things had risen in him that made his veins seem full of fire. He looked this way and that, like a trapped creature that smells clean water and wants to get to it. His ears were singing, his eyes burning, and he dreaded both the return of the two decent girls whom he loved and a possible evening spent with the two girls before him. He tried to speak but he knew that his own accent was thick and uncertain, and he could have burst into tears. There was Cinny lying abandoned, disheveled, her small beautiful form too well revealed by the large meshed transparent jersey she wore, her white face soggy and debauched, her corn-silk hair dampened and matted. A sense of degradation came to Dunstan. The fact that the other two could not and would not feel this obsessed him. Cinny was such a little fool. He stood on the bank and raged childishly. "We couldn't be commoner if we were wharf rats! I've seen Chinatown people behaving better than--than we have. We're a lot of vile pigs." It was characteristic of Dunstan that he included himself in the indictment. He turned toward the snake-wreathed Gertrude. "You knew that stuff was drugged, and you fed it to us all," the boy, staring disgustedly on the three, half sobbed in his frenzy. He went to the bank's edge nervously, gesticulating. "It was a rotten trick, and I--well, I know that we've behaved like swine, and I'll say so. Yes, I don't care, I'll bawl us out. I'll bawl myself out--I'll----" Poor Dunstan flung out his arms in a passionate gesture. "Aw!" they jeered. "Aw, say!" But the beringed Tawny also rose. He stood wobbling his canoe, stabbing at the water aimlessly, and the oratorical manner he maintained would have been funny, had not his very words revealed his befuddled condition. "Well, I can tell you," he swore solemnly, "that you insult these ladies. Yes, sir! That's it, you insult 'em. If I had a gun I'd crown you--yes. That's it, you insult these ladies." Tawny's tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of his mouth; he wet his lips. With a surly squint of the eyes, he faced the youth on the bank. "These ladies" did not seem particularly resentful on their own account. But the squalidness of it all, the silly and disgusting company in which he found himself, burned up into Dunstan's head. The boy almost hopped as he strode toward Tawny.