“I don’t ’ave no truck o’ that kind,” Lovey declared, loftily. “I’m a doer, I am—when I get a-goin’. I don’t brag beforehand—not like some.” I was still curious, however, about myself. “And what did you make out of my looks, Pyn?” He stopped, stood off, and eyed me. “Do you know what you’re like now?” “I know I’m not like anything human.” “You’re like a twenty-dollar bill that’s been in every pawnshop, and every bar, and every old woman’s stocking, and every old bum’s pocket, and is covered with dirt and grease and microbes till you wouldn’t hardly hold it in your hand; but it’s still a twenty-dollar bill—that’ll buy twenty dollars’ worth every time—and whenever you like you can get gold for it.” “Thank you, Pyn,” I returned, humbly, as we went on our way again. “That’s the whitest thing that has ever been said to me.” Before we reached Vandiver Street, Pyn had given us two bits of information, both of which I was glad to receive. One was entirely personal, being a brief survey of his fall and rise. The son of a barber in one of the small towns near New York, he had gone to work with a druggist on leaving the high school. His type, as he described it, had been from the beginning that of the cheap sport. Cheap sports had been his companions, and before he was twenty-one he had married a pretty manicure girl from his father’s establishment. He had married her while on a spree, and after the spree had repented. Repenting chiefly because he wasn’t earning enough to keep a wife, he threw the blame for his mistake on her. When a baby came he was annoyed; when a second baby came he was desperate; when a third baby promised to appear he was overwhelmed. Since the expenses of being a cheap sport couldn’t be reduced, he saw no resource but flight to New York, leaving his wife to fend for herself and her children. Folly having made of him a hard drinker, remorse made of him a harder one. And since no young fellow of twenty-four is callous enough to take wife-desertion with an easy conscience, my own first talks with him had been filled with maudlin references to a kind of guilt I hadn’t at the time understood. All I knew was that from bad he had gone to worse, and from worse he was on the way to the worst of all, when old Colonel Straight rescued him. The tale of that rescue unfolded some of the history of the Down and Out. As to that, Pyn laid the emphasis on the fact that the club was not a mission—that is, it was not the effort of the safe to help those who are in danger; it was the effort of those who are in danger to help themselves. Built up on unassisted effort, it was self-respecting. No bribes had ever been offered it, and no persuasions but such as a man who has got out of hell can bring to bear on another who is still frying in the fire. Its action being not from the top downward, but from the bottom upward, it had a native impulse to expansion.