Clapp, a well-to-do widower from Old Hominy, pursued his stealthy courtship of Miss Florry Mangle, the trained nurse. Her limp face made a white blot in the darkness; she spoke in a tired whine:
“I thought she was too old for him when I saw her.’Gene’s only a kid. He’s taken it hard, you can tell by looking at him how miserable he is. He’s going to get sick if he keeps on at this rate. He’s thin as a bone. He hardly eats a bite. People get run down like that and catch the first disease that comes along—”
Her melancholy whine continued as Jake’s stealthy thigh fumbled against her. She kept her arms carefully folded across her sagging breasts.
In the gray darkness, the boy turned his starved face on them. His dirty clothes lapped round his scarecrow body: his eyes burned like a cat’s in the dark, his hair fell over his forehead in a matted net.
“He’ll git over it,” said Jake Clapp, in a precise country drawl, streaked with a note of bawdry. “Every boy has got to go through the Calf-Love stage. When I was about’Gene’s age—” He pressed his hard thigh gently against Florry, grinning widely and thinly with a few gold teeth. He was a tall solid man, with a hard precise face, lewdly decorous, and slanting Mongol eyes. His head was bald and knobby.
“He’d better watch out,” whined Florry sadly. “I know what I’m talking about. That boy’s not strong—he has no business to go prowling around to all hours the way he does. He’s on the verge of—”
Eugene rocked gently on his feet, staring at the boarders with a steady hate. Suddenly he snarled like a wild beast, and started down the porch, unable to speak, reeling, but snarling again and again his choking and insane fury.
“Miss Brown” meanwhile sat primly at the end of the porch, a little apart from the others. From the dark sun-parlor at the side came swiftly the tall elegant figure of Miss Irene Mallard, twenty— eight, of Tampa, Florida. She caught him at the step edge, and pulled him round sharply, gripping his arms lightly with her cool long fingers.
