Besides, a draw meant another fight between them with plenty of money in the house.
This evening in fistiana was perhaps the most powerful single experience which influenced Al at this period of his life. For a long time he sat silent beside Moxey on the return trip, pondering the physical beauty of Johnny and the Kid and ruefully comparing their bodies with his own.
He sighed, "And now I s'pose your cousin'll go out and kill it to-night!"
"Not him," Moxey reassured; "he never touches it in any form or shape, understand."
"He's training all the time?" continued Al, bent on deciphering the secret ways of greatness.
"Oh," then Al relapsed into silence to wrestle with the angel of training all the time.
Like most young fellows, Al regarded his body as the source of all the happiness that amounted to anything. The brain was merely its adjunct, its money maker and guide. Its operations might lead to life, but they were not life like the body's.
It flashed upon him in the train bound home from the fight that he might achieve joy in either of two ways, by going in for sports or "sporting," by perfecting the animal in him or by abusing it, by getting into as good shape as Kid O'Mara or into as bad shape as the pale waster crumpled in the seat across the aisle.
So began a struggle in him, not yet ended, between the Ormuzd and Ahriman of physical condition. His high achievement thus far has been sixth place in a river Marathon swimming race, his completest failure thirty-six successive drunken hours in the restricted district.
Al wasn't much of a head at books. Georgia persuaded him to start in high school, but he soon came out, for he found that it interfered with the free expression of his personality. There were too many girls about one and he became extremely apprehensive lest he develop into a regular lah-de-dah.
Georgia was more afraid of his developing into a regular rough and tough, so they had a very intense time of it in the flat while the question was under discussion.
Mother Talbot sided with neither of them. She wanted Al to continue his instructions, but in the institutions under the direction of the Church. She couldn't reconcile herself to Al's getting his learning in a place where the very name of God was banned, as it was in the public schools.