ng stone was going to gather moss.

For three months Carl took seriously the dirtiest things in the world.
He worked sixteen hours a day for eight dollars a week, cleaning
cuspidors, scrubbing the floor, scattering clean sawdust, cutting the
more rotten portions off the free-lunch meat. As he slopped about with
half-frozen, brittle rags, hoboes pushed him aside and spat on the
floor he had just cleaned.

Of his eight dollars a week he saved four. He rented an airshaft
bedroom in the flat of a Jewish sweatshop worker for one dollar and
seventy-five cents a week. It was occupied daytimes by a cook in an
all-night restaurant, who had taken a bath in 1900 when at Coney
Island on an excursion of the Pip O'Gilligan Association. The room was
unheated, and every night during January Carl debated whether to go to
bed with his shoes on or off.

The sub-landlord's daughter was a dwarfish, blotched-faced, passionate
child of fifteen, with moist eyes and very low-cut waists of coarse
voile (which she pronounced "voyle"). She would stop Carl in the dark
"railroad" hallway and, chewing gum rapidly, chatter about the
aisleman at Wanamacy's, and what a swell time there would be at the
coming ball of the Thomas J. Monahan Literary and Social Club, tickets
twenty-five cents for lady and gent, including hat-check. She let Carl
know that she considered him close-fisted for never taking her to the
movies on Sunday afternoons, but he patted her head and talked to her
like a big brother and kept himself from noticing that she had
clinging hands and would be rather pretty, and he bought her a
wholesome woman's magazine to read--not an entirely complete solution
to the problem of what to do with the girl whom organized society is
too busy to nourish, but the best he could contrive just then.

Sundays, when he was free for part of the day, he took his book of
recipes for mixed drinks to the reading-room of the Tompkins Square
library and gravely studied them, for he was going to be a bartender.

Every night when he staggered from the comparatively clean air of the
street into the fetid chill of his room he asked himself why he--son
of Northern tamaracks and quiet books--went on with this horrible
imitation of living; and each time answered himself that, whether
there was any real reason or not, he was going to make good on one job
at least, and that the one he held. And admonished himself that he was
very well paid for a saloon porter.

If