It was a state of serenity with just one dominating impulse—to get back among the comrades with whom I had already found shelter. Whatever I had that could be called a homing instinct was bound for the house in Vandiver Street. There had been times when I thought I had outlived that phase, times when what seemed like a new and higher companionship, with a new and higher place in the world and in men’s esteem, half persuaded me that I was so little the waster in fact and the criminal in possibility that the Down and Out was no more to me than a sloughed skin to the creature that has thrown it off. But I always waked from this pleasant fancy to see myself as in essentials the same gaunt, tattered, hungry fellow who had come with his buddy to beg a meal and a bed of the Poor Brothers of the Order of Pity, who never refused any homeless, besotted man. No matter what battles I fought, what medals I won, what banquets I was asked to sit down at, my place was among them; and among them I hoped to do my work. They were all American citizens, with as much weight, when it came to the franchise, as the moneyed potentates of Wall Street. As being not only my brethren, but a nucleus of public opinion as well, I had had no other vision before me for my return than that of sharing their humble refreshments and talk, together with that blind, desperate, devoted fraternity which made a city of refuge of the home that had once been Miss Smedley’s. And since coming on board that vision was threatened by another—one in which I saw myself moving amid compliments and flowers and polite conventions, in all the entangling convolutions of the silken net. Whether it would be with or without love was, in my state of mind, beside the mark. Love had ceased to be, for the time being, at any rate, the ruling factor in a man’s decisions about himself. There was a moratorium of love, let there be one of morals or not. “I’ve got to,” had been the reply to love made by twenty millions of men all over the world, either under compulsion or of their own free will; and women had accepted the answer valiantly. The difficulty in my case sprang of choice. “I’ve got to” wasn’t imperative enough. Or if imperative, it was imperative on both sides equally. _CHAPTER XXII_ And then a word was said which, though solving no problems, opened up a new line of suggestion.