Then she broke into crying; and a great chance I had. There she was, a girl all white and pink in her negligee; and tears, real tears! I got out and was lucky to be able to get. IX I SEEK THE UNDERWORLD. For sketching a situation, no one ever touched Shakespeare; and he has a line which certainly described my state of dignity during the next days. It’s in “Julius Cæsar”; Anthony has just been saying, in some well chosen words which escape me for the moment, how important and prominent a citizen Cæsar was before his last meeting with Brutus, whereas afterwards there was “none so poor to do him reverence.” That’s the description which struck me. Lord knows, I was no Cæsar, not even in Chicago; so my fall was not so far, yet the reception at bottom was much the same. Of course, if you call the incorrigible habits of house servants “reverence” I still had some from them; at least, they kept calling me “sir” and “Mr. Stephen” and somebody sneaked in when nobody else was looking, and turned down my bed, and Warner drew my bath and saw to my shirts. Down at the office, Miss Severns continued to take my letters in a resigned sort of way; but, in general, I was the joke of everybody that knew I still believed in Jerry. For a while the police watched me, on the theory that Jerry, after having worked me for ten thousand following his attack on Dorothy Crewe, would probably come back and get me to give him twenty now; but he didn’t. So the “bulls” left me alone to go wandering off, as soon as I dared, into the northwest morass of Chicago in search of Klangenberg. I had that territory as part of my sales district in the days after I had finished college, when father was starting me out in the bean business. Previously I had gathered, in a theoretical way, that people who went to Princeton or elsewhere to college in the east, and their parents, sisters and other relatives could not provide the number of appetites, locally and in the surrounding States, to account for everything we sold. Not at all; it was perfectly plain that we must sell to any number of people of sorts one would never meet in the general round of sleeping and breakfasting on Astor Street, driving to the office, lunching at the club, and dining on the Drive and dancing at the Casino. In fact, father took occasion to impress upon me that the caviar and truffle trade of Fanneal and Company would barely pay club dues; what bought motors and butlers and opera boxes was the business in beans--plain baked beans, with or without tomato sauce. And the habit of dinner dances, jaunts to England and the Continent had become family pleasures to the Fanneals solely because a large proportion of the populace living on streets which only by error would ever be listed in mother’s address book had taken to the taste of our soups and spaghetti in preference to the purées and macaroni put out under other brands.