“It would be nice if you could get some place,” said Carrie, prompted by anxiety and hope.

“I guess I will,” he said reflectively.

For some days thereafter he put on his overcoat regularly in the morning and sallied forth.  On these ventures he first consoled himself with the thought that with the seven hundred dollars he had he could still make some advantageous arrangement.  He thought about going to some brewery, which, as he knew, frequently controlled saloons which they leased, and get them to help him.  Then he remembered that he would have to pay out several hundred any way for fixtures and that he would have nothing left for his monthly expenses.  It was costing him nearly eighty dollars a month to live.

“No,” he said, in his sanest moments, “I can’t do it.  I’ll get something else and save up.”

This getting-something proposition complicated itself the moment he began to think of what it was he wanted to do.  Manage a place?  Where should he get such a position?  The papers contained no requests for managers.  Such positions, he knew well enough, were either secured by long years of service or were bought with a half or third interest.  Into a place important enough to need such a manager he had not money enough to buy.

Nevertheless, he started out.  His clothes were very good and his appearance still excellent, but it involved the trouble of deluding.  People, looking at him, imagined instantly that a man of his age, stout and well dressed, must be well off.  He appeared a comfortable owner of something, a man from whom the common run of mortals could well expect gratuities.  Being now forty-three years of age, and comfortably built, walking was not easy.  He had not been used to exercise for many years.  His legs tired, his shoulders ached, and his feet pained him at the close of the day, even when he took street cars in almost every direction.  The mere getting up and down, if long continued, produced this result.

The fact that people took him to be better off than he was, he well understood.  It was so painfully clear to him that it retarded his search.  Not that he wished to be less well appearing, but that he was ashamed to belie his appearance by incongruous appeals.  So he hesitated, wondering what to do.

He thought of the hotels, but instantly he remembered that he had had no experience as a clerk, and, what was more important, no acquaintances or friends in that line to whom he could go.  He did know some hotel owners in several cities, including New York, but they knew of his dealings with Fitzgerald and Moy.  He could not apply to them.  He thought of other lines suggested by large buildings or businesses which he knew of—­wholesale groceries, hardware, insurance concerns, and the like—­but he had had no experience.

How to go about getting anything was a bitter thought.  Would he have to go personally and ask; wait outside an office door, and, then, distinguished and affluent looking, announce that he was looking for something to do?  He strained painfully at the thought.  No, he could not do that.