; he
washed--breaking a dish now and then; he even got down on protesting
sore knees and sloshed around in an attempt at scrubbing the knotty,
splintery floor. He tried to cook dinner and breakfast, but his
repertoire consisted of frying--fried eggs, fried bacon, fried bread,
fried pork chops, which Mother pretended to like, though they gave her
spasms of indigestion. In the richest city in the world he haggled with
abusive push-cart peddlers over five cents' worth of cabbage. He was
patient, but wrinkled with hopelessness.

With two warm days in succession, and the grippe gone, Father found work
as a noontime waiter in a piggery on Third Avenue, where contractors'
workmen devoured stew and sour coffee, and the waiters rushed gaspingly
about in filthy white aprons. After the lunch hour he washed dishes in
soapy water that quickly changed from white to grease-filmed black. For
this he received fifty cents a day and his lunch. He hid the depressing
fact of such employment from Mother, but religiously saved the daily
fifty cents to give to her at Christmas. He even walked for an hour
after each lunch, to get the smell of grease out of his clothes, lest
she suspect.... A patient, quiet, anxious, courteous, little aging man,
in a lunch-room that was noisy as a subway, nasty as a sewer excavation.

Without admitting it to himself, he had practically given up the search
for work. After Christmas--something would happen, he didn't know what.
Anyway, they wouldn't go back to their daughter's prison-place unless
Mother became ill.

He discovered the life of idle men in New York--not the clubmen, but
those others. Shabby, shuffling, his coat-collar turned up and secured
with a safety-pin, he poked through Tompkins Square, on sunny days, or
talked for hours to hoboes who scorned him as a man without experience
of brake-beam and rods, of hoboes' hangouts and the Municipal Lodging
House.

When it was too cold to sit in the park, he tried to make himself
respectable of aspect, by turning down his coat-collar and straightening
his streaky tie, before he stalked into the Tompkins Square branch of
the public library, where for hours he turned over the pages of
magazines on whose text he could concentrate less each day that he was
an outcast accepting his fate. When he came out, the cold took him like
the pain of neuralgia, and through streets that were a smear of snow and
dust and blackened remains of small boys' bonfires he shuffled