“No, you got her wrong. She said she can’t stand to see you workin’ so hard for a few dollars to take her out when you go without things you need. That’s why she’s up behind that counter in the Five and Ten. Don’t that prove that she loves you?”

“It sounds funny to me,” said the Bearcat.

“Didn’t I tell you women is queer that way?”

The Bearcat stared into space with a bewildered look trying to figure it out. He wanted to believe Joe.

“I’ll be on the up an’ up with you, Bearcat,” Joe told him. “I’ll tell you the truth. She begged me to take you away. The girl acshally cried. I seen the tears in her eyes meself. You got to go. This is your only chance. The only way to make her happy.”

The Bearcat stuck out his hand.

“Joe, you always was a friend in need.”

Joe grinned.

The next day Bearcat rented his taxi on a percentage basis, bought some gym clothes and met Joe on the Albany boat en route for the training camp in the Adirondacks.

Joe saw that the good word reached Babe. She was free now to continue in the dope racket without fear of Bearcat’s busting up the game. And what a choice line of customers came regularly for rouge sticks! Her end of the profits mounted up. Then too the guys that came to her apartment paid well.

XV HARLEM

THE OLD, old story of civilization’s lusts was being retold in Harlem. The lusts that ancient Rome and Athens could not purge from their proud and disciplined cultures—the flesh cry that has persisted through all time—found expression and release in the region of New York’s black belt.

Harlem is the Paris of the Western Hemisphere—a museum of occult sex, a sensual oasis in the sterile desert of white civilization, where conventional people can indulge in unconventional excesses.

In Harlem the hell-holes flourish side by side with high colored respectability. A house of prostitution secretly carries on its traffic next to a church. Abominations are offered for sale so guardedly that even the most observant cannot guess what is going on. In yesteryears Chicago and New York’s Chinatown were the oases for those seeking sensual diversions or perversions. Now Harlem is the pool of sex, where all colors are blended, all bloods mingled. A pool whose overflow will color the mind and body of countless thousands for generations to come.

Breathing this atmosphere, Babe was in her element. In another incarnation she might have been a votary of Aphrodite, sitting in the temple gardens, with her face lightly veiled to the eyes, her breasts and thighs exposed, waiting—waiting for him who would take and enjoy her.