ffection for the grim and
sordid place. Time had made him sib to its spirit, close to its
niggard heart. Scarcely a nook or corner of it with which he was not
on terms of the most intimate acquaintance. In the adjoining room a
deserted woman had died by her own hand; her moans, filtered through
the dividing wall, had summoned P. Sybarite--too late. The double
front room on the same floor harboured an amiable couple whose
sempiternal dissensions only his tact and persistence ever served to
still. The other hall-bedroom had housed for many years a dipsomaniac
whose periodic orgies had cost P. Sybarite many a night of bedside
vigil. On the floor below lived a maiden lady whose quenchless hopes
still centred about his amiable person. Downstairs in the clammy
parlour he had whiled away unnumbered hours assisting at dreary
"bridge drives," or playing audience to amateur recitals on the aged
and decrepit "family organ." For an entire decade he had occupied the
same chair at the same table in the basement dining-room, feasting on
beef, mutton, Irish stew, ham-and-beans, veal, pork, or
just-hash--according to the designated day of the week....

The very room in which he sat was somehow dear to him; upon it he
wasted a sentiment in a way akin to that with which one regards the
grave of a beloved friend; it was, in fact, the tomb of his own youth.
Its narrow and impoverished bed had groaned with the restless weight
of him all those many nights through which he had lain wakeful, in
impotent mutiny against the outrageous circumstances that made him a
prisoner there. Its walls had muted the sighs in which the desires of
youth had been spent. Its floor matting was worn threadbare with the
impatient pacings of his feet (four strides from door to window: swing
and repeat _ad libitum_). Its solitary gas-jet had, with begrudged
illumination, sicklied o'er the pages of those innumerable borrowed
books with which he had sought to dull poignant self-consciousness....

A tomb!... Bitterly he granted the aptness of that description of his
cubicle: mausoleum of his every hope and aspiration, sepulchre of all
his ability and promise. In this narrow room his very self had been
extinguished: a man had degenerated into a machine. Everything that
caught his eye bore mute witness to this truth: the shabby tin alarm
clock on the battered bureau was one of a dynasty that had roused him
at six in the morning with unfailing regularity three hundred and