m. He couldn't remember what yesterday
had been. He counted back laboriously and decided that today must be
Thursday. Not that it made any difference.

They had lived in the city almost a year now. But the city had not
digested Ben. He was a leathery morsel that could not be assimilated.
There he stuck in Chicago's crop, contributing nothing, gaining
nothing. A rube in a comic collar ambling aimlessly about Halsted
Street or State downtown. You saw him conversing hungrily with the
gritty and taciturn Swede who was janitor for the block of red-brick
flats. Ben used to follow him around pathetically, engaging him in the
talk of the day. Ben knew no men except the surly Gus, Minnie's
husband. Gus, the firebrand, thought Ben hardly worthy of his
contempt. If Ben thought, sometimes, of the respect with which he had
always been greeted when he clumped down the main street of
Commercial--if he thought of how the farmers for miles around had come
to him for expert advice and opinion--he said nothing.

Sometimes the janitor graciously allowed Ben to attend to the furnace
of the building in which he lived. He took out ashes, shoveled coal.
He tinkered and rattled and shook things. You heard him shoveling and
scraping down there, and smelled the acrid odor of his pipe. It gave
him something to do. He would emerge sooty and almost happy.

"You been monkeying with that furnace again!" Bella would scold. "If
you want something to do, why don't you plant a garden in the back yard
and grow something? You was crazy about it on the farm."

His face flushed a slow, dull red at that. He could not explain to her
that he lost no dignity in his own eyes in fussing about an inadequate
little furnace, but that self-respect would not allow him to stoop to
gardening--he who had reigned over six hundred acres of bountiful soil.

On winter afternoons you saw him sometimes at the movies, whiling away
one of his many idle hours in the dim, close-smelling atmosphere of the
place. Tokyo and Rome and Gallipoli came to him. He saw beautiful
tiger-women twining fair, false arms about the stalwart but yielding
forms of young men with cleft chins. He was only mildly interested. He
talked to anyone who would talk to him, though he was naturally a shy
man. He talked to the barber, the grocer, the druggist, the streetcar
conductor, the milkman, the iceman. But the price of wheat did not
interest these gentlemen. They did not know th