We stood for a minute at the edge of one of the long, sordid avenues where a sordid life was surging up and down. Men, women, and children of all races and nearly all ranks were hurrying to and fro, each bent on an errand. It was the fact that life provided an errand for each of them that suddenly struck me as the most wonderful thing in creation. There was no one so young or so old, no one so ignorant or so alien, that he was not going from point to point with a special purpose in view. Among the thousands and the tens of thousands who would in the course of the morning pass the spot on which we stood, there would probably not be one who hadn’t dressed, washed, and breakfasted as a return for his daily contribution to the common good. Never before and hardly ever since did I have such a sense of life’s infinite and useful complexity. There was no height to which it didn’t go up; there was no depth to which it didn’t go down. No one was left out but the absolute wastrel like myself, who couldn’t be taken in. Though it was not a cold day, the steadiness of the drizzle chilled me. The dampness of the pavements got through the worn soles of my boots, and I suppose it did the same with Lovey’s. The lack of food made the old man white, and that of drink set him to trembling. The fact that he hadn’t shaved for the past day or two gave his sodden face a grisly look that was truly appalling. Though the pale-blue eyes were extinct, as if the spirit in them had been quenched, they were turned toward me with the piteous appeal I had sometimes seen in those of a blind dog. It was for me to take the lead, and yet I couldn’t wholly see in what direction to take it. While I was pondering, Lovey made a variety of suggestions. “There doesn’t seem to be nothink for it, sonny, but to go and repent for a day or two. I ’ate to do it; kind o’ deceivin’ like, it is; but they’ll let us dry ourselves and give us a feed if we ’ave a sense of sin.” I wondered if he had in mind anything better than what I had myself. “Where?” He took the negative side first. “We couldn’t go to the Saviour, because I’ve put it over on ’em twice this year already. And the ’Omeless Men won’t do nothink for ye onless you make it up in menial work.” “I won’t try either of them,” I said, briefly. “Don’t blame you, sonny, not a bit. Kind o’ makes a hypercrite of a man, it does. I ’ate to be a hypercrite, only when I carn’t ’elp it.” He went on to enumerate other agencies for the raising of the fallen, of most of which he had tested the hospitality during the past few years. I rejected them as he named them, one by one. To this rejection Lovey subscribed with the unreasoning dislike all outcast men feel for the hand stretched down to them from higher up. Nothing but starvation would have forced him to any of these thresholds; and for me even starvation would not work the miracle. “What’s the matter with the Down and Out?” I sprang on him, suddenly.