d to him. He applied here and in one house found a room for
four dollars which he thought he had better take for the present. It was
cheaper than any hotel. His hostess was a shabby woman in black who made
scarcely any impression on him as a personality, merely giving him a
thought as to what a dreary thing it was to keep roomers and the room
itself was nothing, a commonplace, but he had a new world before him and
all his interests were outside. He wanted to see this city. He deposited
his grip and sent for his trunk and then took to the streets, having
come to see and hear things which would be of advantage to him.

He went about this early relationship to the city in the right spirit.
For a little while he did not try to think what he would do, but struck
out and walked, here, there and everywhere, this very first day down
Broadway to the City Hall and up Broadway from 14th to 42nd street the
same night. Soon he knew all Third Avenue and the Bowery, the wonders of
Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, the beauties of the East River, the
Battery, Central Park and the lower East Side. He sought out quickly the
wonders of metropolitan life--its crowds at dinner and theatre time in
Broadway, its tremendous throngs morning and afternoon in the shopping
district, its amazing world of carriages in Fifth Avenue and Central
Park. He had marveled at wealth and luxury in Chicago, but here it took
his breath away. It was obviously so much more fixed, so definite and
comprehensible. Here one felt intuitively the far reaches which separate
the ordinary man from the scion of wealth. It curled him up like a
frozen leaf, dulled his very soul, and gave him a clear sense of his
position in the social scale. He had come here with a pretty high
estimate of himself, but daily, as he looked, he felt himself crumbling.
What was he? What was art? What did the city care? It was much more
interested in other things, in dressing, eating, visiting, riding
abroad. The lower part of the island was filled with cold commercialism
which frightened him. In the upper half, which concerned only women and
show--a voluptuous sybaritism--caused him envy. He had but two hundred
dollars with which to fight his way, and this was the world he must
conquer.

Men of Eugene's temperament are easily depressed. He first gorged the
spectacle of life and then suffered from mental indigestion. He saw too
much of it too quickly. He wandered about for weeks, looking in the s