She disregarded the money appeal.  “But you like it, this—this ‘game’ you call it.  Why?”

He lacked speech-expression.  He expressed himself with his hands, at his work, and with his body and the play of his muscles in the squared ring; but to tell with his own lips the charm of the squared ring was beyond him.  Yet he essayed, and haltingly at first, to express what he felt and analyzed when playing the Game at the supreme summit of existence.

“All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring when you’ve got the man where you want him, when he’s had a punch up both sleeves waiting for you and you’ve never given him an opening to land ’em, when you’ve landed your own little punch an’ he’s goin’ groggy, an’ holdin’ on, an’ the referee’s dragging him off so’s you can go in an’ finish ’m, an’ all the house is shouting an’ tearin’ itself loose, an’ you know you’re the best man, an’ that you played m’ fair an’ won out because you’re the best man.  I tell you—”

He ceased brokenly, alarmed by his own volubility and by Genevieve’s look of alarm.  As he talked she had watched his face while fear dawned in her own.  As he described the moment of moments to her, on his inward vision were lined the tottering man, the lights, the shouting house, and he swept out and away from her on this tide of life that was beyond her comprehension, menacing, irresistible, making her love pitiful and weak.  The Joe she knew receded, faded, became lost.  The fresh boyish face was gone, the tenderness of the eyes, the sweetness of the mouth with its curves and pictured corners.  It was a man’s face 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, and the 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 face she did not know at all.

And yet, while it frightened her, she was vaguely