not more deplorable than I had expected from the look
of the street and the house and the stairs and the girl with the large
hat. It was small, badly arranged, disordered, ugly, bare, comfortless,
and, if not very dirty, certainly not clean; not a home, but a kennel--a
kennel furnished with chairs and spotted mirrors and spotted engravings
and a small upright piano; a kennel whose sides were covered with
enormous red poppies, and on whose floor was something which had once
been a carpet; a kennel fitted with windows and curtains; a kennel with
actually a bed! It was the ready-made human kennel of commerce, which
every large city supplies wholesale in tens of thousands to its victims.
In that street there were hundreds such; in the house alone there were
probably a score at least. Their sole virtue was their privacy. Ah the
blessedness of the sacred outer door, which not even the tyrant concierge
might violate! I thought of all the other interiors of the house, floor
above floor, and serried one against another--vile, mean, squalid,
cramped, unlovely, frowsy, fetid; but each lighted and intensely alive
with the interplay of hearts; each cloistered, a secure ground where the
instincts that move the world might show themselves naturally and in
secret. There was something tragically beautiful in that.

I had heard uncomfortable sounds from the bedroom. Then Diaz called out:

'It's no use. Can't do it. Can't get into bed.' I went directly to him.
He sat on the bed, still clasping the umbrella, one arm out of his coat.
His gloomy and discouraged face was the face of a man who retires baffled
from some tremendously complicated problem.

'Put down your umbrella,' I said. 'Don't be foolish.'

'I'm not foolish,' he retorted irritably. 'Don't want to loosh thish
umbrella again.'

'Well then,' I said, 'hold it in the other hand, and I will help you.'

This struck him as a marvellous idea, one of those discoveries that
revolutionize science, and he instantly obeyed. He was now very drunk. He
was nauseating. The conventions which society has built up in fifty
centuries ceased suddenly to exist. It was impossible that they should
exist--there in that cabin, where we were alone together, screened, shut
in. I lost even the sense of convention. I was no longer disgusted.
Everything that was seemed natural, ordinary, normal. I became his
mother. I became his hospital nurse. And at length he lay in bed,
clutching the umbrella to his