He could not afford even to sit and talk with her very long; there was no time to indulge in the luxury of despair. His money was gone, and he was in debt for some that he had borrowed. Since irregular eating had been telling upon him again, he had been getting his meals with an acquaintance of the family, who kept a boarding-house uptown. On the strength of his prospects, she had trusted him for four dollars a week; and now the play had failed, and he had to go and tell her, and listen to new protests as to his folly in refusing to “get a position”. But in the end she bade him stay on; and so he was divided between his shame, and the need of something to eat day by day. Time dragged on, and still there was no gleam of light. There were shameful hours in these weeks--he touched the lowest point yet in his life. This was a typical cheap boarding-house, a place where the drudges of trade were herded; it was a home of sordidness and ugliness--to Thyrsis its people seemed like carefully selected types of all things that he hated in the world. There was a young broker’s clerk, whose patter was of prices, and of fortunes made without service. There was a grey-haired bookkeeper for a giant “trust”, a man who could not have had more pride in that great engine of exploitation, or more contempt for its victims, had he been the president and chief owner thereof. There was a young divinity-student, who made greedy reaches for the cake-plate, and who summed up for Thyrsis all the cant and commonness of the church. There was a dry-goods clerk, who wore flaring ties, and who played the role of a “masher” upon the avenue every evening. And finally there was a red-faced Irish-man who wore large shiny cuffs and a false diamond, and who held some political job, and was voluble in behalf of “the organization”. Among these people Thyrsis sat three times a day, silent and tortured, paying a high price for each morsel of food he ate. But also he was lonely, and craving any sort of respite; and in the course of time he became acquainted with several of the younger men. One of the diversions in their pitiful and narrow lives was to gather in some room and indulge in petty gambling; sitting for hours upon hours with their faculties alert upon the attempt to get from each other some small fraction of that weekly stipend which kept them alive. Sometimes they played “penny-ante”, and sometimes _vingt_ _et_ _un_; once, as it chanced, they needed another player, and they urged Thyrsis to join them.