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 back at Jock again. His dark glance brooded over the room and his lips were twisted to sneer.

"It's enough to make you sick!" he went on savagely. "Damn' swine! Look at the way they paw each other, and kiss each other, and leer unspeakable rottenness out of their eyes! 'Children of disobedience.' That's from the Episcopal prayer book, and I've remembered it since prep school, and lately every time I look around this hole I think of it. '. . . lust, evil concupiscence . . . for which things' sake the wrath of God falleth on the children of disobedience. '  When—if I ever write a book that'll be the title, and it'll be all about people like these"

He ceased, smiling. "I'm popping off, as usual."

Yvonne was silent, running her fingers up and down the stem of her water goblet. Presently Jock resumed speaking. "To tell the truth," he said in a somewhat mollified tone, "I guess it's not so much that I'm sore at the Tavern as that I'm sore at myself. I have been ever since the night they started flinging money. That was the night I began to see just what a caricature of a real he-man I look like. First year out of college—year of laying a lifetime's cornerstone, it ought to be—and what did I do with it? And what did I allow you to do?" He indicated the surroundings with a sweep of his hand, and his scowl deepened. "Fine!" he finished witheringly. "Most laudable! Jock Hamill, the human jellyfish!"

Another lull. Yvonne lit a cigarette and eyed its slender upward twirl of bluish smoke. Jock dug his hands into his pockets, seeming by this gesture to pull his whole long body lower in the chair. His eyes focussed themselves on a bar pin fastened to the bodice of Yvonne's gown, but she knew he was not thinking of the bar pin.