I was too much of a goody-goody ever to gamble myself. I would merely sit for hours as spectator. It was intense pleasure merely to have under my eyes the type of adolescent that sows wild oats.
Among my associates in the Rialto resorts were youthful actors playing at the several theatres, racetrack book-makers, wealthy adolescents who spent their evenings sipping gross pleasures, and high-fliers of the feminine persuasion—at that date as thick in the Rialto as flies in summer around an open jug of molasses.
I was now in my third year of leading a double life. My every-day circle was without suspicion. Outside my one evening per week in the Rialto, I led a most industrious student life, even winning prizes. I had already been awarded the bachelor's degree cum laude and was in my first year of graduate study. Of course I had never revealed to any Rialto associate that I was a university student. I was known there merely as "Jennie June," while the few who took the trouble to inquire my legal name never questioned "Ralph Werther." And my three most intimate Lothario friends of the Rialto were too busy evenings—Martin and Paul,[1] chasing chippies, and Buddie, victimizing youthful greenhorns—to investigate where I spent my time while not in the Rialto. They have each asked me where I lived. I gave a fictitious address, hoping they would not investigate. And they never did. And my three most intimate androgyne friends—Roland Reeves, Eunice, and Phyllis—were, like myself, living a double life incognito, and thus
- ↑ Martin and Paul are depicted in THE RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD.
