“It’s a trick,” said Hurstwood.  “That’s all.  They’ll start another place there all right.”

Carrie looked at him, and gathered from his whole demeanor what it meant.  It was serious, very serious.

“Do you think you can get something else?” she ventured, timidly.

Hurstwood thought a while.  It was all up with the bluff about money and investment.  She could see now that he was “broke.”

“I don’t know,” he said solemnly; “I can try.”

Chapter XXXIV THE GRIND OF THE MILLSTONES—­A SAMPLE OF CHAFF

Carrie pondered over this situation as consistently as Hurstwood, once she got the facts adjusted in her mind.  It took several days for her to fully realize that the approach of the dissolution of her husband’s business meant commonplace struggle and privation.  Her mind went back to her early venture in Chicago, the Hansons and their flat, and her heart revolted.  That was terrible!  Everything about poverty was terrible.  She wished she knew a way out.  Her recent experiences with the Vances had wholly unfitted her to view her own state with complacence.  The glamour of the high life of the city had, in the few experiences afforded her by the former, seized her completely.  She had been taught how to dress and where to go without having ample means to do either.  Now, these things-ever-present realities as they were—­ filled her eyes and mind.  The more circumscribed became her state, the more entrancing seemed this other.  And now poverty threatened to seize her entirely and to remove this other world far upward like a heaven to which any Lazarus might extend, appealingly, his hands.

So, too, the ideal brought into her life by Ames remained.  He had gone, but here was his word that riches were not everything; that there was a great deal more in the world than she knew; that the stage was good, and the literature she read poor.  He was a strong man and clean--how much stronger and better than Hurstwood and Drouet she only half formulated to herself, but the difference was painful.  It was something to which she voluntarily closed her eyes.

During the last three months of the Warren Street connection, Hurstwood took parts of days off and hunted, tracking the business advertisements.  It was a more or less depressing business, wholly because of the thought that he must soon get something or he would begin to live on the few hundred dollars he was saving, and then he would have nothing to invest—­he would have to hire out as a clerk.

Everything he discovered in his line advertised as an opportunity, was either too expensive or too wretched for him.  Besides, winter was coming, the papers were announcing hardships, and there was a general feeling of hard times in the air, or, at least, he thought so.  In his worry, other people’s worries became apparent.  No item about a firm failing, a family starving, or a man dying upon the streets, supposedly of starvation, but arrested his eye as he scanned the morning papers.  Once the “World” came out with a flaring announcement about “80,000 people out of employment in New York this winter,” which struck as a knife at his heart.