Life had been swift and sheer with Winnie. She was very tired and,
paradoxically enough, it gave her one of her last remaining charms. Her
eyelids were freighted with weariness, were waxy white of it, and they
could flutter to her cheeks, like white butterflies against white, and
lay shadows there that maddened Jason.
She called him Red, although all that remained now were the lights
through his browning hair, almost like the flashings of a lantern down a
railroad track.
She pronounced it with a slight trilling of the R, and if it was left in
her of half a hundred loves to stir on this swift descent of her life
line, she did over Jason. Partly because he was his winged-Hermes self,
and partly because--because--it was difficult for her rather fagged
brain to rummage back.
Thus the rest may be told:
Entering her rooms one morning, a pair of furiously garish ones over a
musical-instrument store on the Bowery, he threw himself full length on
the red-cotton divan, arms locked under his always angry-looking head,
and watching her, through low lids, trail about the room at the business
of preparing him a surlily demanded cup of coffee.
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