through a rising
blizzard, after dinner at the Florida Lunch Room, where he had allowed
himself a ten-cent dessert for celebration.

But when he lolled in his hall bedroom, with his eyes attracted, as
usual, to the three cracks in the blue-painted ceiling which made a
rough map of Africa, when he visioned lands where there were lions and
desert instead of department-store packages, his happiness wilted in
face of the fact that he had only $10.42, with $8.00 due him from the
store the following Tuesday. Several times he subtracted the $3.00 he
owed the landlady from $18.42, but the result persisted in being only
$15.42. He could not make $15.42 appear a reasonable sum with which to
start life anew.

He had to search for a new job that evening. Only--he was so tired; it
was so pleasant to lie there with his sore feet cooling against the
wall, picturing a hunt in Africa, with native servants bringing him
things to eat: juicy steaks and French-fried potatoes and gallons of
ale (a repast which he may have been ignorant in assigning to the
African jungles, but which seemed peculiarly well chosen, after a
lunch-room dinner of watery corned-beef hash, burnt German-fried
potatoes, and indigestible hot mince-pie). His thoughts drifted off to
Plato. But Carl had a certain resoluteness even in these loose days.
He considered the manoeuvers for a new job. He desired one which
would permit him to go to theaters with the girl in white furs whom he
had seen that noon--the unknown fairy of his discontent.

It may be noted that he took this life quite seriously. Though he did
not suppose that he was going to continue dwelling in a hall bedroom,
yet never did he regard himself as a collegian Haroun-al-Raschid on an
amusing masquerade, pretending to be no better than the men with whom
he worked. Carl was no romantic hero incog. He was a workman, and he
knew it. Was not his father a carpenter? his father's best friend a
tailor? Had he not been a waiter at Plato?

But not always a workman. Carl had no conception of world-wide
class-consciousness; he had no pride in being a proletarian. Though
from Bone's musings and Frazer's lectures he had drawn a vague
optimism about a world-syndicate of nations, he took it for granted
that he was going to be rich as soon as he could.

Job. He had to have a job. He got stiffly up from the iron bed,
painfully drew on his shoes, after inspecting the hole in the sole of
the left shoe and the ripped sea