When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of the boy entering the room.  He reached for it with eager, trembling arm, drew back.  “Put it on the table,” he said.

The boy left.  He was alone.  Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes.  It contained his destiny.  If she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured.  If she refused, he would cease to struggle.  He rose, took from a locked drawer a bottle of rye whisky.  He poured a tall glass—­the kind called a bar glass—­half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a quiver.  The shock brought him up standing.  He looked and acted like his former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and read: 

  “I am willing to marry you, if you really want me.  I am so tired of
  struggling, and I don’t see anything but dark ahead.—­D.  H.”

Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed.  He felt the blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until nearly one o’clock.

To an outsider there would have been a world of homely commonplace pathos in that little letter of the girl’s if read aright, that is to say, if read with what was between the lines supplied.  It is impossible to live in cities any length of time and with any sort of eyes without learning the bitter unromantic truths about poverty—­city poverty.  In quiet, desolate places one may be poor, very poor, without much conscious suffering.  There are no teasing contrasts, no torturing temptations.  But in a city, if one knows anything at all of the possibilities of civilized life, of the joys and comforts of good food, clothing, and shelter, of theater and concert and excursion, of entertaining and being entertained, poverty becomes a hell.  In the country, in the quiet towns, the innocent people wonder at the greediness of the more comfortable kinds of city people, at their love of money, their incessant dwelling upon it, their reverence for those who have it, their panic-like flight from those who have it not.  They wonder how folk, apparently human, can be so inhuman.  Let them be careful how they judge.  If you discover any human being anywhere acting as you think a human being should not, investigate all the circumstances, look thoroughly into all the causes of his or her conduct, before you condemn him or her as inhuman, unworthy of your kinship and your sympathy.