played the Game, and the goal of the Game was to
down an antagonist and keep that antagonist down for a space of ten
seconds. So he never struck merely to hurt; the hurt was incidental to
the end, and the end was quite another matter. And yet here, with this
girl he loved, came the desire to hurt. Why, when with thumb and
forefinger he had ringed her wrist, he should desire to contract that
ring till it crushed, was beyond him. He could not understand, and felt
that he was discovering depths of brutality in his nature of which he had
never dreamed.

Once, on parting, he threw his arms around her and swiftly drew her
against him. Her gasping cry of surprise and pain brought him to his
senses and left him there very much embarrassed and still trembling with
a vague and nameless delight. And she, too, was trembling. In the hurt
itself, which was the essence of the vigorous embrace, she had found
delight; and again she knew sin, though she knew not its nature nor why
it should be sin.

Came the day, very early in their walking out, when Silverstein chanced
upon Joe in his store and stared at him with saucer-eyes. Came likewise
the scene, after Joe had departed, when the maternal feelings of Mrs.
Silverstein found vent in a diatribe against all prize-fighters and
against Joe Fleming in particular. Vainly had Silverstein striven to
stay the spouse's wrath. There was need for her wrath. All the maternal
feelings were hers but none of the maternal rights.

Genevieve was aware only of the diatribe; she knew a flood of abuse was
pouring from the lips of the Jewess, but she was too stunned to hear the
details of the abuse. Joe, her Joe, was Joe Fleming the prize-fighter.
It was abhorrent, impossible, too grotesque to be believable. Her clear-
eyed, girl-cheeked Joe might be anything but a prize-fighter. She had
never seen one, but he in no way resembled her conception of what a prize-
fighter must be--the human brute with tiger eyes and a streak for a
forehead. Of course she had heard of Joe Fleming--who in West Oakland
had not?--but that there should be anything more than a coincidence of
names had never crossed her mind.

She came out of her daze to hear Mrs. Silverstein's hysterical sneer,
"keepin' company vit a bruiser." Next, Silverstein and his wife fell to
differing on "noted" and "notorious" as applicable to her lover.

"But he iss a good boy," Silverstein was contending. "He make der money,
an' he s