wanderings which followed his leaving
Plato College. For more than a year he went down, down in the social
scale, down to dirt and poverty and association with the utterly tough
and reckless. But day by day his young joy of wandering matured into
an ease in dealing with whatever man or situation he might meet. He
had missed the opportunity of becoming a respectable citizen which
Plato offered. Now he did all the grubby things which Plato obviated
that her sons might rise to a place in society, to eighteen hundred
dollars a year and the possession of evening clothes and a knowledge
of Greek. But the light danced more perversely in his eyes every day
of his roving.

The following are the several jobs for which Carl first applied in
Chicago, all the while frightened by the roar and creeping shadows of
the city:

Tutoring the children of a millionaire brewer; keeping time on the
Italian and Polack washers of a window-cleaning company; reporting on
an Evanston newspaper; driving a taxicab, a motor-truck; keeping books
for a suburban real-estate firm. He had it ground into him, as grit is
ground into your face when you fall from a bicycle, that every one in
a city of millions is too busy to talk to a stranger unless he sees a
sound reason for talking. He changed the _Joralemon Dynamite's_
phrase, "accept a position" to "get a job"--and he got a job, as
packer in a department store big as the whole of Joralemon. Since the
street throngs had already come to seem no more personal and
separable than the bricks in the buildings, he was not so much
impressed by the crowds in the store as by the number of things for
women to hang upon themselves. He would ramble in at lunch-time to
stare at them and marvel, "You can't beat it!"

From eight till twelve-thirty and from one till six or seven, during
nearly two months, Carl stood in a long, brick-walled, stuffy room,
inundated by floods of things to pack, wondering why he had ever left
Plato to become the slave of a Swede foreman. The Great World, as he
saw it through a tiny hole in one of the opaque wire-glass windows,
consisted of three bars of a rusty fire-escape-landing against a
yellow brick wall, with a smudge of black on the wall below the
landing.

Within two days he was calling the packing-room a prison. The
ceaseless rattle of speckled gray wrapping-paper, the stamp of feet on
the gray cement floor, the greasy gray hair of the packer next to him,
the yellow-stained, crac