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.

"All I know, Genevieve, is that you feel good in the ring when you've got
the man where you want him, when he's had a punch up both sleeves waiting
for you and you've never given him an opening to land 'em, when you've
landed your own little punch an' he's goin' groggy, an' holdin' on, an'
the referee's dragging him off so's you can go in an' finish 'm, an' all
the house is shouting an' tearin' itself loose, an' you know you're the
best man, an' that you played m' fair an' won out because you're the best
man. I tell you--"