she was welcome to stay
for a while anyhow. Meanwhile he figured he could weather any storm
alone.

The appearance of the metropolis, after somewhat over two years of
absence during which he had wandered everywhere, was most impressive to
Eugene. It was a relief after the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee
and the loneliness of the Biloxi coast, to get back to this swarming
city where millions were hurrying to and fro, and where one's misery as
well as one's prosperity was apparently swallowed up in an inconceivable
mass of life. A subway was being built. The automobile, which only a few
years before was having a vague, uncertain beginning, was now attaining
a tremendous vogue. Magnificent cars of new design were everywhere. From
the ferry-house in Jersey City he could see notable changes in the
skyline, and a single walk across Twenty-third Street and up Seventh
Avenue showed him a changing world--great hotels, great apartment
houses, a tremendous crush of vainglorious life which was moulding the
city to its desires. It depressed him greatly, for he had always hoped
to be an integral part of this magnificence and display and now he was
not--might never be again.

It was still raw and cold, for the spring was just beginning to break,
and Eugene was compelled to buy a light overcoat, his own imperishable
great coat having been left behind, and he had no other fit to wear.
Appearances, he thought, demanded this. He had spent forty of his
closely-guarded one hundred and seventy-five dollars coming from Biloxi
to New York, and now an additional fifteen was required for this coat,
leaving him one hundred and twenty-five dollars with which to begin his
career anew. He was greatly worried as to the outcome, but curiously
also he had an abiding subconscious feeling that it could not be utterly
destructive to him.

He rented a cheap room in a semi-respectable neighborhood in West
Twenty-fourth Street near Eleventh Avenue solely because he wanted to
keep out of the run of intellectual life and hide until he could get on
his feet. It was an old and shabby residence in an old and shabby red
brick neighborhood such as he had drawn in one of his views, but it was
not utterly bad. The people were poor but fairly intellectual. He chose
this particular neighborhood with all its poverty because it was near
the North River where the great river traffic could be seen, and where,
because of some open lots in which were stored wagons, h