THE HUNGRY GLEAM
"I have a breast of steel. Had it been any one else in my place they'd soon have shown you the door, saying, 'Live without me, tramp the streets, I'm not your born slave.'"
She went out, and there remained in his memory her doll-like figure, puffy arms, yellow triangle of a brow over black waxy eyes, her yellow triangle of tucked-up yellow petticoat, the little triangle of her red snuffing nose. Three triangles.
All day Moshkin was hungry, gay, and wicked. He strayed aimlessly in the streets. He looked at the girls, and they all seemed to him dear, gay, ready to be loved—by the rich. He stopped before jewellers' windows, and the hungry gleam grew keener in his eyes.
He bought a newspaper. Read it on a seat in the square where the children were running and laughing, where the nurses aped the fashions, and the air was full of dust and the smell of dry leaves—and the smell of the streets and the garden mixed disagreeably and reminded him of gutta-percha. In the newspaper Moshkin was struck by the story of a man who had gone mad through hunger, and who, in his dementia, had gone into a gallery and slashed a picture about with his knife.
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