He ascended into the fine parlor of the Morton House, then one of the best New York hotels, and, finding a cushioned seat, read.  It did not trouble him much that his decreasing sum of money did not allow of such extravagance.  Like the morphine fiend, he was becoming addicted to his ease.  Anything to relieve his mental distress, to satisfy his craving for comfort.  He must do it.  No thoughts for the morrow—­he could not stand to think of it any more than he could of any other calamity.  Like the certainty of death, he tried to shut the certainty of soon being without a dollar completely out of his mind, and he came very near doing it.

Well-dressed guests moving to and fro over the thick carpets carried him back to the old days.  A young lady, a guest of the house, playing a piano in an alcove pleased him.  He sat there reading.

His dinner cost him $1.50.  By eight o’clock he was through, and then, seeing guests leaving and the crowd of pleasure-seekers thickening outside wondered where he should go.  Not home.  Carrie would be up.  No, he would not go back there this evening.  He would stay out and knock around as a man who was independent-not broke—­well might.  He bought a cigar, and went outside on the corner where other individuals were lounging—­brokers, racing people, thespians—­his own flesh and blood.  As he stood there, he thought of the old evenings in Chicago, and how he used to dispose of them.  Many’s the game he had had.  This took him to poker.

“I didn’t do that thing right the other day,” he thought, referring to his loss of sixty dollars.  “I shouldn’t have weakened.  I could have bluffed that fellow down.  I wasn’t in form, that’s what ailed me.”

Then he studied the possibilities of the game as it had been played, and began to figure how he might have won, in several instances, by bluffing a little harder.

“I’m old enough to play poker and do something with it.  I’ll try my hand to-night.”

Visions of a big stake floated before him.  Supposing he did win a couple of hundred, wouldn’t he be in it?  Lots of sports he knew made their living at this game, and a good living, too.

“They always had as much as I had,” he thought.

So off he went to a poker room in the neighborhood, feeling much as he had in the old days.  In this period of self-forgetfulness, aroused first by the shock of argument and perfected by a dinner in the hotel, with cocktails and cigars, he was as nearly like the old Hurstwood as he would ever be again.  It was not the old Hurstwood—­only a man arguing with a divided conscience and lured by a phantom.

This poker room was much like the other one, only it was a back room in a better drinking resort.  Hurstwood watched a while, and then, seeing an interesting game, joined in.  As before, it went easy for a while, he winning a few times and cheering up, losing a few pots and growing more interested and determined on that account.  At last the fascinating game took a strong hold on him.  He enjoyed its risks and ventured, on a trifling hand, to bluff the company and secure a fair stake.  To his self-satisfaction intense and strong, he did it.