Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

After stumbling through another day of heaving muscles and bruised shins, with his self-hatred gloating over the slavery of his body, he met Petersen and the two girls at a down-town street-corner, grinning at the thought of what this experience might hold, for he liked the idea of pretending to be a sensual beggar while a sneer within him played the part of a bystander.

Petersen's sweetheart, Katie Anderson, was a short, plump girl who tried, with the incessant swiftness of her tongue, to apologize for the excessive slowness of her thoughts. The coarse roundness of her face was determinedly obscured by rouge and powder, and her large brown eyes were continually shifting, as though they feared that stillness might betray some secret which they held. Her face knew a species of sly and mild cunning not unlike that of a rabbit frequently beaten by life but clinging to its mask of courage while hopping through the forest of sensual experience. Her friend, Lucy Melkin, was more subdued and helplessly candid. Her small slender body stooped a little as though some unseen hand were pressing too familiarly upon one of her shoulders -- a hand of exhausted fear -- and the pale oval of her face had the twist of a loosely pleading infant beneath its idiotic red and white. Her blue eyes seemed to be endlessly waiting for something to strike them and wondering why the blow failed to arrive on time.