He drew up his chair near the radiator and lighted the gas.  Then it was as the evening before.  His difficulties vanished in the items he so well loved to read.

The next day was even worse than the one before, because now he could not think of where to go.  Nothing he saw in the papers he studied—­ till ten o’clock—­appealed to him.  He felt that he ought to go out, and yet he sickened at the thought.  Where to, where to?

“You mustn’t forget to leave me my money for this week,” said Carrie, quietly.

They had an arrangement by which he placed twelve dollars a week in her hands, out of which to pay current expenses.  He heaved a little sigh as she said this, and drew out his purse.  Again he felt the dread of the thing.  Here he was taking off, taking off, and nothing coming in.

“Lord!” he said, in his own thoughts, “this can’t go on.”

To Carrie he said nothing whatsoever.  She could feel that her request disturbed him.  To pay her would soon become a distressing thing.

“Yet, what have I got to do with it?” she thought.  “Oh, why should I be made to worry?”

Hurstwood went out and made for Broadway.  He wanted to think up some place.  Before long, though, he reached the Grand Hotel at Thirty-first Street.  He knew of its comfortable lobby.  He was cold after his twenty blocks’ walk.

“I’ll go in their barber shop and get a shave,” he thought.

Thus he justified himself in sitting down in here after his tonsorial treatment.

Again, time hanging heavily on his hands, he went home early, and this continued for several days, each day the need to hunt paining him, and each day disgust, depression, shamefacedness driving him into lobby idleness.

At last three days came in which a storm prevailed, and he did not go out at all.  The snow began to fall late one afternoon.  It was a regular flurry of large, soft, white flakes.  In the morning it was still coming down with a high wind, and the papers announced a blizzard.  From out the front windows one could see a deep, soft bedding.

“I guess I’ll not try to go out to-day,” he said to Carrie at breakfast.  “It’s going to be awful bad, so the papers say.”

“The man hasn’t brought my coal, either,” said Carrie, who ordered by the bushel.

“I’ll go over and see about it,” said Hurstwood.  This was the first time he had ever suggested doing an errand, but, somehow, the wish to sit about the house prompted it as a sort of compensation for the privilege.

All day and all night it snowed, and the city began to suffer from a general blockade of traffic.  Great attention was given to the details of the storm by the newspapers, which played up the distress of the poor in large type.

Hurstwood sat and read by his radiator in the corner.  He did not try to think about his need of work.  This storm being so terrific, and tying up all things, robbed him of the need.  He made himself wholly comfortable and toasted his feet.