Transcribed from the 1913 William Heinemann edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Many patterns of carpet lay rolled out before them on the floor—twoof Brussels showed the beginning of their quest, and its ending in thatdirection; while a score of ingrains lured their eyes and prolongedthe debate between desire pocket-book. The head of the departmentdid them the honor of waiting upon them himself—or did Joe thehonor, as she well knew, for she had noted the open-mouthed awe of theelevator boy who brought them up. Nor had she been blind to themarked respect shown Joe by the urchins and groups of young fellowson corners, when she walked with him in their own neighborhood downat the west end of the town.
But the head of the department was called away to the telephone,and in her mind the splendid promise of the carpets and the irk of thepocket-book were thrust aside by a greater doubt and anxiety.
“But I don’t see what you find to like in it, Joe,”she said softly, the note of insistence in her words betraying recentand unsatisfactory discussion.
For a fleeting moment a shadow darkened his boyish face, to be replacedby the glow of tenderness. He was only a boy, as she was onlya girl—two young things on the threshold of life, house-rentingand buying carpets together.
“What’s the good of worrying?” he questioned. “It’s the last go, the very last.”
He smiled at her, but she saw on his lips the unconscious and allbut breathed sigh of renunciation, and with the instinctive monopolyof woman for her mate, she feared this thing she did not understandand which gripped his life so strongly.
“You know the go with O’Neil cleared the last paymenton mother’s house,” he went on. “And that’soff my mind. Now this last with Ponta will give me a hundred dollarsin bank—an even hundred, that’s the purse—for youand me to start on, a nest-egg.”
She disregarded the money appeal. “But you like it, this—this‘game’ you call it. Why?”
He lacked speech-expression. He expressed himself with hishands, at his work, and with his body and the play of his muscles inthe squared ring; but to tell with his own lips the charm of the squaredring was beyond him. Yet he essayed, and haltingly at first, toexpress what he felt and analyzed when playing the Game at the supremesummit of existence.
“All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring whenyou’ve got the man where you want him, when he’s had a punchup both sleeves waiting for you and you’ve never given him anopening to land ’em, when you’ve landed your own littlepunch an’ he’s goin’ groggy, an’ holdin’on, an’ the referee’s dragging him off so’s you cango in an’ finish ’m, an’ all the house is shoutingan’ tearin’ itself loose, an’ you know you’rethe best man, an’ that you played m’ fair an’ wonout because you’re the best man. I tell you—”
He ceased brokenly, alarmed by his own volubility and by Genevieve’slook of alarm. As he talked she had watched his face while feardawned in her own. As he described the moment of moments to her,on his inward vision were lined the tottering man, the lights, the shoutinghouse, and he swept out and away from her on this tide of life thatwas beyond her comprehension, menacing, irresistible, making her lovepitiful and weak. The Joe she knew receded, faded, became lost. The fresh boyish face was gone, the tenderness of the eyes, the sweetnessof the mouth with its curves and pictured corners. It was a man’sface she saw, a face of steel, tense and immobile; a mouth of steel,the lips like the jaws of a trap; eyes of steel, dilated, intent, andthe light in them and the glitter were the light and glitter of steel. The face of a man, and she had known only his boy face. This faceshe did not know