Now, however ...  P. Sybarite realised suddenly that habit had instilled into his bosom a sort of mean affection 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 sixty-five times per year (Sundays were too rare in his calendar and too precious to be wasted abed).  From an iron hook in the window frame dangled the elastic home-exerciser with which it was his unfailing habit to perform a certain number of matutinal contortions, to keep his body wholesome and efficient.  Beneath the bed was visible the rim of a shallow English tub that made possible his subsequent sponge bath....