"But I don't see what you find to like in it, Joe," she said softly, the
note of insistence in her words betraying recent and unsatisfactory
discussion.
For a fleeting moment a shadow darkened his boyish face, to be replaced
by the glow of tenderness. He was only a boy, as she was only a girl--two
young things on the threshold of life, house-renting and 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 all but
breathed sigh of renunciation, and with the instinctive monopoly of woman
for her mate, she feared this thing she did not understand and which
gripped his life so strongly.
"You know the go with O'Neil cleared the last payment on mother's house,"
he went on. "And that's off my mind. Now this last with Ponta will give
me a hundred dollars in bank--an even hundred, that's the purse--for you
and 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 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.
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