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By Root 1642 0

trouble, and they were gone. The bunch sat around and talked about revenges. Studs didn’t say much; he didn’t even look anybody in the eye. Suddenly, he got up and left, and the guys said that when Studs walked away from his friends like that, without saying a word, he was pretty Goddamn sore, and when he was pretty Goddamn sore, he wasn’t the kind of a guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley. He walked for blocks, not recognizing where he was going, feeling disgraced, feeling that everybody was against him, blaming everybody, blaming that little runt, Danny O’Neill. He felt that he was a goddamn clown. He blamed himself for getting soft and goofy about a skirt. He planned how he would get even, and kept telling himself that no matter what happened, it couldn’t really affect him, because STUDS LONIGAN was an iron man, and when anybody laughed at the iron man, well, the iron man would knock the laugh off the face of Mr. Anybody with the sweetest paste in the mush that Mr. Anybody ever got. He vowed this, and felt his iron muscle for assurance. But he didn’t really feel like an iron man. He felt like a clown that the world was laughing at. He walked, getting sorer and sorer and filling his mind with the determination to get back at . . . Indiana Avenue, the whole damn street. As far as he was concerned, it could go plumb to hell. He was through hanging around with the Indiana Avenue mopes, and as for O’Neill, well, Studs Lonigan hadn’t even begun to pay that little droopy-drawers back yet.

When Studs got home, Martin, speaking like he had been coached, said:

“How’s Lucy?”

“I seen Lucy today; she looked nice, like she was looking for someone ... and she had paint on her lips,” Fritzie said.

Frances asked him if he was going over to see Lucy after supper. If he was, she’d walk over with him . . . and she said if he was he had better wash himself clean and shine his shoes.

The old man sang monotonously:

Goodbye, boys . . .

For I . . . get . . . married . . . tomorrow . . .

Mrs. Lonigan seriously warned him that he was still a little young and he would have plenty of time later on for girls, and girls would make a fool of him, and he should not be thinking of them, but he should be praying and meditating to see if he had a vocation or not.

Studs walked out of the room, saying that they could all go to hell. He heard them laughing after him. Even the walls and the furniture seemed to laugh, to jibe and jeer. He went out for a walk without eating, and he met Helen Borax on Fifty-eighth Street. She asked him how Lucy’s gentleman was, and said that she heard he was a specialist in osculation; she said she would never have believed it, but she couldn’t doubt all the proof she had seen around the neighborhood in the last few days. And she would never be able to understand how Lucy mistook him for Francis X. Bushman; but then everyone had his or her right to like people. She said she knew Lucy needed a sort of roughneck to carry her books when she went to high school, because Lucy was going to St. Elizabeth’s, and it was in a nigger neighborhood, and he could protect her, and walk home with her through the nigger neighborhood. Helen spoke so swiftly and cattishly that Studs couldn’t get in a word edgewise. She didn’t stop for over five minutes, and then she only paused for breath. After she had talked a blue streak, they stood making faces at each other.

He said, sore as a boil:

“Kiss may . . .”

She blushed, gulped, swallowed, looked shocked and horror-stricken. He turned his back on her, and walked away.

“Lucy’s gentleman!” Helen called after him.

He turned and thumbed his nose.

VI

The next day he wandered forlorn streets, wishing that he would meet Dan, or Helen Shires, or someone, and not having the nerve to go around Indiana, where he might find them. At Fifty-eighth and Prairie, he met Lucy. She was with some girl he didn’t know, and she said hello booby to him, winking at her friend. He got sore, and stuttered goofy things to her, like she needn’t think she was so much. She said she was a lady, and only cared