The payment in full, at any rate, relieved my conscience, for the way we bullied that poor old Jewess was inexcusable. The excuse I found seemed adequate at the time, however--we must frighten her or be turned out. Each time she pressed for payment, out came my heavy artillery; imaginary insects, threats of newspaper articles, bluster, bluff and bullying of every description, often reducing her to tears, and a final indignant volley to the effect that “If you don’t trust us, we had better go; in fact, if this occurs again, we _shall_ go!” More than once we pretended to pack up; more than once I announced that we had found other rooms; “Next Monday I shall pay you the few dollars we owe, and leave your house, and you will read an account of your conduct in the _Evening Sun_, Mrs. Bernstein.” She invariably came to heel. “I ask my hospand” had no sequel. By frightening and bullying her, I stayed on and on and on, owing months’ and months’ rent and breakfast; our ascendancy over her was complete. It was, none the less, a shameful business, for at the time it seemed doubtful if we should ever be in a position to pay the kind old woman anything at all.... The fifteen months I now spent reporting for the _Evening Sun_ at fifteen dollars a week lie in the mind like a smudged blur of dreary wretchedness, a few incidents only standing out.... The desire for the drug was conquered, the old doctor was dead, Kay had obtained a position with a firm in Exchange Place, where he made a small, uncertain income in a business that was an absolute mystery to me, the buying and selling of exchange between banks. Louis B---- had meanwhile arrived, without a cent to his name. It was a long and bitter period, three of us in a small room again, but at least an honest three. Louis’s French temperament ran to absinthe--when he could get it. He used the mattress on the floor, while Kay and I shared the bed between us. Our clothes were useless to the short, rotund little Frenchman; as the weeks passed he looked more and more like a pantomime figure in the streets, and when he went to give his rare French and Spanish lessons he never dared to take off his overcoat (which he had managed to keep) even in the hottest room, nor during the most torrid of summer days. Often he dared not unbutton the collar he turned up about his neck, affirming with much affected coughing that he had a “dreadful throat.” He was, by nature and habit, an inveterate cigarette smoker; a cigarette, indeed, meant more to him than a meal, and I can still see him crawling about the floor of the room on all fours in the early morning, “hunting snipe,” as he called it--in other words, looking for fag-ends. He was either extremely sanguine or extremely depressed; in the former mood he planned the most alluring and marvellous schemes, in the latter he talked of suicide. His wife, whom he dearly loved, had a baby soon after his arrival. He suffered a good deal....