“This is on the level, Ben.”

“What! Ah, go on! You on the level?”

“All the same, I am.”

“You can’t be on the level! You don’t know how.”

“Why?”

“You got a wife, and you know damn well you have.”

“Yes, and she’s getting her divorce.”

Stull regarded him with habitual and sullen distrust.

“She hasn’t got it yet.”

“She’ll get it. Don’t worry.”

“I thought you was for fighting it.” 67

67

“I was going to fight it; but––” His slow, narrow, greenish eyes stole toward the house across the road.

“Just like that,” he said, after a slight pause; “that’s the way the little girl hit me. I’m on the level, Ben. First skirt I ever saw that I wanted to find waiting dinner for me when I come home. Get me?”

“I don’t know whether I do or not.”

“Get this, then; she isn’t all over paint; she’s got freckles, thank God, and she smells sweet as a daisy field. Ah, what the hell––” he burst out between his parted teeth “—when every woman in New York smells like a chorus girl! Don’t I get it all day? The whole city stinks like a star’s dressing room. And I married one! And I’m through. I want to get my breath and I’m getting it.”

Stull’s white features betrayed merely the morbid suffering of indigestion; he said nothing and sucked his cigar.

“I’m through,” repeated Brandes. “I want a home and a wife—the kind that even a fly cop won’t pinch on 

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