“Go get a decent bed, child,” he said, giving her some money.

Her eyes shone at him in the half light like Bambi’s, and he shuddered.  As she sped away a sudden rage possessed him.  Why did they endure, these patient beasts?  They numbered thousands upon thousands, these down-and-outs.  Why did they not stand together, rise up, and take?  Why didn’t he shout them awake, and lead them himself?  “Gimme a nickel to get a drink?” whined a voice at his elbow.

“Here, you, move on!” said the policeman, roughly, arousing Jarvis from his trance.

On the way uptown to his room he thought it over.  If they could organize and stand together, they wouldn’t be what they were.  It was because they were morally and physically disintegrated that they were derelicts.  This waste was part of the price we must pay for commercial supremacy, for money power, for—­oh, sardonic jest!—­for a democracy.

He went back to work with squared shoulders, and worked until dawn.  At three the next afternoon he again presented himself to the Parke butler.  Madame was indisposed, could see no one.  Mr. Jocelyn was to come the next day at three.

This time he wasted no energy in rage at the delay.  He began to see that this was no sham battle on a green hillside of a summer’s day, but a real hand-to-hand fight.  It was to place him, for all time, at the head of the regiment or with the discards.  He had believed that what he had to say was the most important thing, that this errand Bambi had sent him on was a stupid interruption.  But all at once he saw it straight.  This was his fight, here and now.  He would not go back to her until he had won.  He must find the way to finance himself in the meantime.  No more provisions from the Professor or his daughter.  As he made his way downtown he thought over all the possibilities of making enough to live on.  He had never bothered his head about it before.  Like the sparrow, he had been provided for.  But something of his arrogant demanding of life seemed to have fled, a sort of terror had been planted in him by that view of the park-bench sleepers.

How he wished Bambi were here to advise him, to laugh at him, or with him!  The thought of her was constantly creeping into his mind, to be shoved out by a determined effort of his will.  He told himself he was becoming as boneless as the Professor, who relied on her for everything.  That night he wrote to her: 

“I seem to have come to my senses to-day for the first time.  Queer how a man can go on walking, talking, and thinking in his sleep.  I don’t know why I should have wakened up to-day, but a walk I took last night at midnight stirred something in me.  And a futile attempt to see Miss Harper to-day did the rest.  You saw clearly, as you so often do.  This is my fight, right here and now.  I must make somebody believe in this play and produce it.  It may take a long time—­months, perhaps—­but I must stay and face it out.