Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work.  He knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of unprofessional tenderness in his nature.  He was good to his mother, and he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he had left her when he came to Chicago.  After he got that invitation from the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not know it was he who had invented that nickname for him.  He promptly avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Bird of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away.  He failed to move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softening toward him that he was from Burnamy’s own part of Indiana, and was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated.  But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most people seem to get their luck.  They liked him, and some of them liked him for his clean young life as well as for his cleverness.  His life was known to be as clean as a girl’s, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls.

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if the conductor would put him off at the right place.  It was nearly nine o’clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where he had decided to pass the night.  After he found her, and went on board, he was glad he had not gone sooner.  A queasy odor of drainage stole up from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden silences of trampling sea-boots.  Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then he went to his state-room.  His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into his berth.

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving impressions.  He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner.  He thought he would use the material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had begun to dream, and that he must get up.  He was just going to get up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new day outside.  He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; he glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alone in it.  Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature or emotion of the ship’s departure.