perilously near reaching the level of the sodden. His morality
had suffered with it all. Where in his former days of hardship he had
health, ambition, a goal to strive for, friends to keep him honest with
himself, now he had nothing. He was alone; no one cared.

If he had only taken to the track, his passion--legitimate passion--for
horse-flesh would have pulled him through. But the thought that he ever
could ride never suggested itself to him.

He had no opportunity of inhaling the track's atmosphere. Sometimes
he wondered idly why he liked to stop and caress every stray horse. He
could not know that those same hands had once coaxed thoroughbreds down
the stretch to victory. His haunts necessarily kept him from meeting
with those whom he had once known. The few he did happen to meet he cut
unconsciously as he had once cut Jimmy Drake.

And so day by day Garrison's morality suffered. It is so easy for the
well-fed to be honest. But when there is the hunger cancer gnawing at
one's vitals, not for one day, but for many, then honesty and dishonesty
cease to be concrete realities. It is not a question of piling up
luxuries, but of supplying mere necessity.

And day by day as the hunger cancer gnawed at Garrison's vitals it
encroached on his original stock of honesty. He fought every minute
of the day, but he grimly foresaw that there would come a time when he
would steal the first time opportunity afforded.

Day by day he saw the depletion of his honor. He was not a moralist,
a saint, a sinner. Need sweeps all theories aside; in need's fierce
crucible they are transmuted to concrete realities. Those who have never
known what it is to be thrown with Garrison's handicap on the charity
of a great city will not understand. But those who have ever tasted the
bitter crust of adversity will. And it is the old blatant advice from
the Seats of the Mighty: "Get a job." The old answer from the hopeless
undercurrent: "How?"

There came a day when the question of honesty or dishonesty was put up
to Garrison in a way he had not foreseen. The line was drawn distinctly;
there was no easy slipping over it by degrees, unnoticed.

The toilet facilities of municipal lodging-houses are severely crude and
primitive. For the sake of sanitation, the whilom lodger's clothes are
put in a net and fumigated in a germ-destroying temperature. The men
congregate together in one long room, in various stages of pre-Adamite
costumes, and the shower