ror was added to his existence.
He was aware that he had become an object of peculiar interest to the
woman in the next room, that she waited for him and stealthily watched
his going out and his coming in. As he passed on the landing two eyes,
dull or feverish, marked him through the chink of the door that never
closed. By some hideous instinct of her kind she divined the days when
he was in luck. By another instinct she divined also his nature. His
mystic apathy held her brute soul in awe; and she no longer revenged
herself by furious and vindictive song. So he stayed on, for he owed
rent, and removals were expensive.

He found also that there were limits to the advantages of too
eccentric an asceticism in diet. No doubt the strange meals he
prepared for himself on his oil-stove had proved stimulating by their
very strangeness; but when the first shock and surprise of them had
worn off he no longer obtained that agreeable result. Perhaps there
was something cloying in so much milk and cocoa; he fancied he gained
by diluting these rich foods with water. It certainly seemed to him
that his veins were lighter and carried a swifter and more delicate
current to his brain, that his thoughts now flowed with a remarkable
fineness and lucidity. And then all of a sudden the charm stopped
working. What food he ate ceased to nourish him. He grew drowsy by
day, and had bad dreams at night. He had not yet reached the
reconciling stage of nausea, but was forever tormented by a strong and
healthy craving for a square meal. There was a poor devil on the floor
below him whose state in comparison with his own was affluence. That
man had a square meal every Sunday. Even she, the lady of the
ever-open door, was better off than he; there was always, or nearly
always, a market for her wares.

His sufferings would have been unendurable if any will but his own had
imposed them on him in the beginning. Not that he could continue to
regard his poverty as a destiny in any way angelic. It was because
hitherto he had not known the real thing, because he had seen it from
very far away, that it had worn for him that divine benignant aspect.
Now it was very near him; a sordid insufferable companion that dogged
his elbow in the street, that sat with him by his fireless hearth,
that lay beside him all night, a loathsome bedfellow, telling him a
shameful, hopeless tale, and driving the blessed sleep away from him.
There were times when he envied his ne