The conditions under which he worked were now appalling.  It was hard to say whether the attic was more terrible in summer, or in the winter that forced him to the intimate and abominable companionship of his oil-stove.  Nor was that all.  A new horror 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 neighbour her nirvana of gin and water; times when the gross steam of the stew prepared for the man below awoke in him acute, intolerable emotion; times when the spiritual will that dominated him, so far from being purified by abstinence, seemed merged in the will of the body made conspicuous and clamorous by hunger.