athom. He went into the hall,
picked up his hat, and walked out in silence.

David wondered that night, walking the chilly streets after he
quitted the house, and often, often afterward, if that comfortable and
prosperous gentleman, safe beyond the perturbations of youth, had
any idea of what he had done. How COULD he know anything of the black
monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The "desk's
dead wood" and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where
his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless,
hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before
him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till it
maddens him.

The bowed man in the car-seat remembered with a flush of reminiscent
misery how the lad turned suddenly in his walk and entered the door of
a drinking-room that stood open. It was very comfortable within. The
screens kept out the chill of the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled
floor was clean, the tables placed near together, the bar glittering,
the attendants white-aproned and brisk.

David liked the place, and he liked better still the laughter that came
from a room within. It had a note in it a little different from anything
he had ever heard before in his life, and one that echoed his mood. He
ventured to ask if he might go into the farther room.

It does not mean much when most young men go to a place like this. They
take their bit of unwholesome dissipation quietly enough, and are a
little coarser and more careless each time they indulge in it, perhaps.
But certainly their acts, whatever gradual deterioration they may
indicate, bespeak no sudden moral revolution. With this young clerk it
was different. He was a worse man from the moment he entered the door,
for he did violence to his principles; he killed his self-respect.

He had been paid at the office that night, and he had the money--a
week's miserable pittance--in his pocket. His every action revealed the
fact that he was a novice in recklessness. His innocent face piqued the
men within. They gave him a welcome that amazed him. Of course the rest
of the evening was a chaos to him. The throat down which he poured the
liquor was as tender as a child's. The men turned his head with
their ironical compliments. Their boisterous good-fellowship was as
intoxicating to this poor young recluse as the liquor.

It was the revulsion from this feeling, when he came to a co