He went down the three flights of stairs which lay between his chamber and the sordid street, taking his way to a cheap restaurant, which his soul loathed, but to which the narrowness of his purse constrained him. The waiter-girls, gossiping together, knew his shabby figure too well to hasten to serve him with any alacrity born of expectation of tips; but one of them came to stand, leaning by one hand upon the table, while he studied the bill of fare in a vain attempt to discover some dish which would be alike satisfactory to his appetite and his finances. There were stains of coffee and of soup upon the card, which gave him a feeling of disgust, as if his food had been served in an unwashed dish; but he repressed his feelings and made out his meagre order. The damsel filled him the usual glass of ice-water, tossed an evening paper before him, and betook herself to cry the supper he had called for into the mouth of a rubber tube, which hung flabbily out of the wall. West could hear the voice of somebody under ground repeating the order, like a surly subterranean echo, and he was peevishly half inclined to fling a plate at the head of a man at the next table, on the supposition that that individual might have been listening to this double disclosure of the straitness of diet to which his poverty constrained him. He tried to interest himself in the paper which had been given him. He picked out the smallest paragraphs with a feeling of being so much at variance with the world in general that nothing could possibly interest him which was not held to be of no especial moment to the majority. Suddenly he felt that little thrill with which a man always comes upon his name in print. Among a lot of brief jottings was the statement that a man in Chicago had left two hundred thousand dollars to Barum West. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, but instantly his common sense reasserted itself, and he smiled with the bitter but fleeting cynicism of youth at the impossibility that a fortune should come to him by any lucky throw of Fortune's dice. The name was sufficiently uncommon, however, to make the coincidence striking, and what artistic youth, so placed that his wits were more or less disconcerted by the unevenness of life, could fail to make the paragraph the starting-point for a thousand dreams.