That night he fitted down into the mold his body had worn on the pallet,
sighing out satisfaction.
Environment had won him back.
On the other hand, in one of those red star-spangled passions of
rebellion against his fetid days, he blindly cut Hanscha with the edge
of a book which struck against her brow as he hurled it. She had been
drunk and had asked of him, at sixteen, because of the handsomeness
that women would easily love in him, to cadet the neighborhood of Grand
Street, using her tenement as his refuge of vice and herself as sharer
of spoils.
The corner of the book cut deeply and pride in her terror of him came
out redly in her bloodshot eyes.
In the short half term of his high-school training he had already forged
ahead of his class when he attained the maturity of working papers. He
was plunging eagerly--brilliantly, in fact--into a rapid translation
of the _Iliad_, fired from the very first line by the epic of the
hexametered anger of Achilles, and stubbornly he held out against the
working papers.
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