He really strolled about, thinking, and then, the weather being cold, stepped into a hotel.  He knew hotels well enough to know that any decent individual was welcome to a chair in the lobby.  This was in the Broadway Central, which was then one of the most important hotels in the city.  Taking a chair here was a painful thing to him.  To think he should come to this!  He had heard loungers about hotels called chair warmers.  He had called them that himself in his day.  But here he was, despite the possibility of meeting some one who knew him, shielding himself from cold and the weariness of the streets in a hotel lobby.

“I can’t do this way,” he said to himself.  “There’s no use of my starting out mornings without first thinking up some place to go.  I’ll think of some places and then look them up.”

It occurred to him that the positions of bartenders were sometimes open, but he put this out of his mind.  Bartender—­he, the ex-manager!

It grew awfully dull sitting in the hotel lobby, and so at four he went home.  He tried to put on a business air as he went in, but it was a feeble imitation.  The rocking chair in the dining room was comfortable.  He sank into it gladly, with several papers he had bought, and began to read.

As she was going through the room to begin preparing dinner, Carrie said: 

“The man was here for the rent to-day.”

“Oh, was he?” said Hurstwood.

The least wrinkle crept into his brow as he remembered that this was February 2d, the time the man always called.  He fished down in his pocket for his purse, getting the first taste of paying out when nothing is coming in.  He looked at the fat, green roll as a sick man looks at the one possible saving cure.  Then he counted off twenty-eight dollars.

“Here you are,” he said to Carrie, when she came through again.

He buried himself in his papers and read.  Oh, the rest of it-the relief from walking and thinking!  What Lethean waters were these floods of telegraphed intelligence!  He forgot his troubles, in part.  Here was a young, handsome woman, if you might believe the newspaper drawing, suing a rich, fat, candy-making husband in Brooklyn for divorce.  Here was another item detailing the wrecking of a vessel in ice and snow off Prince’s Bay on Staten Island.  A long, bright column told of the doings in the theatrical world—­the plays produced, the actors appearing, the managers making announcements.  Fannie Davenport was just opening at the Fifth Avenue.  Daly was producing “King Lear.”  He read of the early departure for the season of a party composed of the Vanderbilts and their friends for Florida.  An interesting shooting affray was on in the mountains of Kentucky.  So he read, read, read, rocking in the warm room near the radiator and waiting for dinner to be served.

Chapter XXXV THE PASSING OF EFFORT—­THE VISAGE OF CARE