“By damn, I wish they’d hurry up.”

“Look at the copper watchin’.”

“Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther!”

“I wisht I was in Sing Sing.”

Now a sharper lash of wind cut down and they huddled closer.  It was an edging, shifting, pushing throng.  There was no anger, no pleading, no threatening words.  It was all sullen endurance, unlightened by either wit or good fellowship.

A carriage went jingling by with some reclining figure in it.  One of the men nearest the door saw it.

“Look at the bloke ridin’.”

“He ain’t so cold.”

“Eh, eh, eh!” yelled another, the carriage having long since passed out of hearing.

Little by little the night crept on.  Along the walk a crowd turned out on its way home.  Men and shop-girls went by with quick steps.  The cross-town cars began to be crowded.  The gas lamps were blazing, and every window bloomed ruddy with a steady flame.  Still the crowd hung about the door, unwavering.

“Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?” queried a hoarse voice, suggestively.

This seemed to renew the general interest in the closed door, and many gazed in that direction.  They looked at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine and study the knob.  They shifted and blinked and muttered, now a curse, now a comment.  Still they waited and still the snow whirled and cut them with biting flakes.  On the old hats and peaked shoulders it was piling.  It gathered in little heaps and curves and no one brushed it off.  In the center of the crowd the warmth and steam melted it, and water trickled off hat rims and down noses, which the owners could not reach to scratch.  On the outer rim the piles remained unmelted.  Hurstwood, who could not get in the center, stood with head lowered to the weather and bent his form.

A light appeared through the transom overhead.  It sent a thrill of possibility through the watchers.  There was a murmur of recognition.  At last the bars grated inside and the crowd pricked up its ears.  Footsteps shuffled within and it murmured again.  Some one called:  “Slow up there, now,” and then the door opened.  It was push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared.  There were wet hats and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass, pouring in between bleak walls.  It was just six o’clock and there was supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face.  And yet no supper was provided here--nothing but beds.

Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept off with weary steps to his allotted room.  It was a dingy affair—­wooden, dusty, hard.  A small gas jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.

“Hm!” he said, clearing his throat and locking the door.

Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door.  His vest he arranged in the same place.  His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table.  Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down.