f endangered
the morals of the young. It had been bad enough when it seemed merely to
encourage the wearing of nondescript clothes. But if it led to
language--?

Yet she was fated to discover that the world offered worse than golf,
for Wilbur Cowan had not yet completed, in the process of his desultory
education, the out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world
of Newbern. He was to take up an entirely new study, with the
whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas
engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona's view, had he
actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon
knew he had made the joyous descent.

The dreadful secret was revealed when he appeared for his supper one
evening with a black eye. That is, it would have been known technically
as a black eye--even Winona knew what to call it. Actually it was an eye
of many colours, shading delicately from pale yellow at the edge to
richest variegated purple at the centre. The eye itself--it was the
right--was all but closed by the gorgeously puffed tissue surrounding
it, and of no practical use to its owner. The still capable left eye,
instead of revealing concern for this ignominy, gleamed a lively pride
in its overwhelming completeness. The malign eye was worn proudly as a
badge of honour, so proudly that the wearer, after Winona's first outcry
of horror, bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma by
stepping into one of Spike Brennon's straight lefts. Nothing less than
that!

Winona, conceiving that this talk was meant to describe an accident of
the most innocent character, demanded further details; wishing to be
told what a straight left was; why a person named Spike Brennon kept
such things about; and how Wilbur had been so careless as to step into
one. She instinctively pictured a straight left to be something like an
open door into which the victim had stepped in the dark. Her
enlightenment was appalling. When the boy had zestfully pictured with
pantomime of the most informing sort she not only knew what a straight
left was, but she knew that Wilbur Cowan, in stepping into one--in
placing himself where by any chance he could step into one--had flung
off the ultimate restraint of decency.

It amounted to nothing less, she gathered, than that her charge had
formed a sinister alliance with a degraded prize-fighter, a low bully
who for hire and amid the foulest surroundings pander