To live consciously is to register impressions; some receive many more of these per second than others, and thus enjoy an intenser and more varied life. The two-per-second mind finds the two-per-minute one slow, dull and stupid. Kay, anyhow, didn’t “mind” things much, circumstances never troubled him, whereas Boyde and I minded them acutely. I envied Kay’s power of sleeping calmly in that bed, careless of night-attacks until they actually came. The horror of New York, similarly, that was creeping into my blood had hardly touched him, though it certainly had infected Boyde. In my own make-up lay something ultra-sensitive that took impressions far too easily. Not only did it vibrate with unnecessary eagerness to every change in sky and sea, but to every shade of attitude and manner in my fellows as well. I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day. It wounded, not alone because I felt unhappy, but of itself. It hit me where it pleased. The awful city, with its torrential, headlong life, held for me something of the monstrous. Everything about it was exaggerated. Its racing speed, its roofs amid the clouds with the canyon gulfs below, its gaudy avenues dripping gold that ran almost arm in arm with streets little better than sewers of human decay and misery, its frantic noise, both of voices and mechanism, its lavishly organized charity and boastful splendour, and its deep corruption in the grip of a heartless and degraded Tammany--it was all this that painted the horror into my imagination as of something monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly. It became, for me, a scab on the skin of the planet, brilliant with the hues of fever, moving all over with its teeming microbes. I felt it, indeed, but half civilized. This note of how I felt in these--my early years--rose up again the other day, as I read what O. Henry wrote to his outlaw friend from the Ohio Penitentiary about it. Al Jennings had just been pardoned. O. Henry had finished his terms some years before. They met again in a West 26th Street hotel, not far from my own room in Mrs. Bernstein’s house. They talked of their terrible prison days. “It’s good you’ve been there,” said O. Henry. “It’s the proper vestibule to this city of Damned Souls. The crooks there are straight compared with the business thieves here. If you’ve got $2 on you, invest it now or they’ll take it away from you before morning.” CHAPTER XIV In the East 19th Street room, meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse. Kay’s touring company delayed its starting, and consequently his salary. Boyde’s huntsman’s job, equally, was postponed for various reasons, while his income from posing, from churchly activities, from the theatre as well, was reduced to a very few dollars a week. These he shared faithfully, but my $15 every Friday (usually $13 net when office loans had been repaid) were our only certain source of revenue.