Harlson’s dress became of the shabby genteel order.  The binding upon coat and vest had begun to show that little wound which is not wide nor deep, but is past the healing, and the shininess at knees and elbows reflected the light that never was on land or sea, or, at least, ought not to be.  He felt a degradation with it all, though it was with him the result of folly, not of fault, and he made a struggle for reform in his finances.  He abandoned the cheap room in which he lived, and slept upon the office floor at night, the place in decent weather being moderately warm.

The individual from China and the individual from more than one other land, who comes to live with us, can exist on thirty-five cents a day and think his provender the fat of the land.  But he is not a great meat-eater.  The fiber of him is not our own.  His style of tissue was not fixed in northern bay and fjord and English and Norman forests, and his ancestors transmitted to him a self-denying stomach.  He can live in the city upon thirty-five cents a day, and clasp his hands across his abdomen and say, with the thankful, “I have dined.”  Not so the man of Harlson’s type, and of his size.  The sum of two dollars and fifty cents, the young man found, would not feed and clothe him for a week.  He was a boy still, in the freshness of his appetite, yet his demands in quantity were manly, to a certainty.  Six feet of maul-swinging humanity had eaten much, even in midsummer.  That same six feet required more now, when the temperature was low and the system needed carbon.  Perhaps he got all that was good for him; it is well to train down a little occasionally; but Harlson wandered about sometimes with a feeling of sympathy for the wolf of the forest, the hawk of the air, and the pickerel of the waters, all hungry ever and all refusing to live by bread alone.

As time passed this condition of things wore upon the man.  His fancies, if not morbid, became a trifle ugly.  He worked feverishly, but he chafed at his own ignorance of city ways, such that he could not increase his income.  He sought manual labor which could be done at night, but failed even in this, for at that time he lacked utterly the way about him which fits the city, and persuades the man of business when there is little labor to be done.  It was almost a time of panic.  He would wander about the streets at night like a lost spirit.  Sometimes he would meet old college friends.  He had classmates in the city, some of them well-to-do and well established, and they were glad to meet him, the man who had done a little to give the class its record, and he was invited to swell dinners and to parties.  He would but feign excuses, and to none of them told bluntly, as he should have done, just what his situation was, and how a trifling aid would make his future different.  He was very proud, this arrogant product of the old Briton blending and the new world’s new northwest, and he lacked the sense which comes with experience in the bearings of a life all novel, and so he remained silent, and, incidentally, hungry.