After a while, Hurstwood said: 

“Don’t worry about it.  Maybe the grocer will wait.  He can do that.  We’ve traded there long enough to make him trust us for a week or two.”

“Do you think he will?” she asked.

“I think so.”  On this account, Hurstwood, this very day, looked grocer Oeslogge clearly in the eye as he ordered a pound of coffee, and said: 

“Do you mind carrying my account until the end of every week?”

“No, no, Mr. Wheeler,” said Mr. Oeslogge.  “Dat iss all right.”

Hurstwood, still tactful in distress, added nothing to this.  It seemed an easy thing.  He looked out of the door, and then gathered up his coffee when ready and came away.  The game of a desperate man had begun.

Rent was paid, and now came the grocer.  Hurstwood managed by paying out of his own ten and collecting from Carrie at the end of the week.  Then he delayed a day next time settling with the grocer, and so soon had his ten back, with Oeslogge getting his pay on this Thursday or Friday for last Saturday’s bill.

This entanglement made Carrie anxious for a change of some sort.  Hurstwood did not seem to realize that she had a right to anything.  He schemed to make what she earned cover all expenses, but seemed not to trouble over adding anything himself.

“He talks about worrying,” thought Carrie.  “If he worried enough he couldn’t sit there and wait for me.  He’d get something to do.  No man could go seven months without finding something if he tried.”

The sight of him always around in his untidy clothes and gloomy appearance drove Carrie to seek relief in other places.  Twice a week there were matinees, and then Hurstwood ate a cold snack, which he prepared himself.  Two other days there were rehearsals beginning at ten in the morning and lasting usually until one.  Now, to this Carrie added a few visits to one or two chorus girls, including the blue-eyed soldier of the golden helmet.  She did it because it was pleasant and a relief from dullness of the home over which her husband brooded.

The blue-eyed soldier’s name was Osborne—­Lola Osborne.  Her room was in Nineteenth Street near Fourth Avenue, a block now given up wholly to office buildings.  Here she had a comfortable back room, looking over a collection of back yards in which grew a number of shade trees pleasant to see.

“Isn’t your home in New York?” she asked of Lola one day.

“Yes; but I can’t get along with my people.  They always want me to do what they want.  Do you live here?”

“Yes,” said Carrie.

“With your family?”

Carrie was ashamed to say that she was married.  She had talked so much about getting more salary and confessed to so much anxiety about her future, that now, when the direct question of fact was waiting, she could not tell this girl.

“With some relatives,” she answered.