I was depressed on leaving Europe. I grew more depressed because of the experience on board ship. In New York I was still more depressed. There was a month in which all things worked together for evil; and then I came to the place at which Satan had desired to have me. I have not said that during all this time I made no attempt to look up my old friends at the Down and Out or, beyond an occasional argument with Cantyre, to fulfil the mission with which I had been intrusted. Ralph Coningsby had come and offered me work, and I had refused it. Even the march of public events, with the introduction of lawless submarine warfare and the breaking off of diplomatic relations between Germany and the United States, hadn’t roused me. I marked the slow rise of the impulse toward war in the breasts of the American people, as passionless and as irresistible as an incoming tide, but it seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was out of it, flung aside by a fate that had made sport of me. I was so far from the current of whatever could be called life that I grew apathetic. Though I hadn’t seen Regina for weeks, I sat down under the impalpable obstacles between us, making no effort to overcome them. I ate and drank and slept and brooded on the futility of living, and let the doing so fill my time. Lovey was worried, and dogged me round till there were minutes when I could have sprung on him and choked him. Then came the afternoon when I decided that Satan must have his way. There is a hotel in New York of which I had many recollections because I had frequented its barroom in the days before I went altogether down. It is a somewhat expensive-looking barroom, with heavy mahogany, gilded cornices, and frescoes of hunting-scenes on the wall. Hanging over the bar at any time during the day or night can be seen all the types that are commonly known as sporting, from the dashing to the cheap. They might have been the same as on that day when I turned my back upon the place five years previously. They hung in the same attitudes; they called for the same drinks; they used the same profanities, though with some novelty in the slang. With my limp, my black patch, and my general haggardness, I felt like a ghost returning among them. Timidly I approached a barman at leisure and asked for a cocktail of a brand for which I used to have a liking. I carried it off to a table placed inconspicuously behind the door leading to and from the hotel. Putting it on the table, I stared at its amber reflections. I had come back to the same old place at last. It was curious; but there I was. All my struggling, all my wandering, all my up-hill work, all my days and nights in the trenches, all my suffering, all my love—everything had combined together to land me just here, where, so to speak, I had begun. It was the old story of dragging up the cliff, only to fall over the precipice. It seemed to be my fate. There was no escaping it.