"How is he now?" I asked in a muffled tone, thinking basely to give her the idea that I had watched the night through. "Sleeping quietly," was the reply. "His fever is mostly gone." "That’s splendid," I murmured sheepishly. "You are up—er—early, aren’t you?" "I just lay here on these chairs," she answered quietly. "I looked in at Jimmie about every half hour. He had a very good night." With a sharp pang of annoyance mingled with relief, I felt myself stark and unmasked. We gazed at each other in silence for a moment, and then I broke into muffled laughter, in which she softly joined. And though I felt myself a fool, I vow I could have hugged that child to my heart of hearts for her sense of humor no less than for her silent unfailing constancy. Like sunlight after storm, Jimmie’s recovery is making the apartment ring again, and when it rings too much I close my door. I close my door, but not upon the bills. These keep pouring in with the insistent buzzing of a swarm of hornets, and every day I see them with a more helpless dismay. I figure and I add and I calculate, but I seem unable to subtract. I cannot see how we could do without the things that are bought. Already my modest current account is near the point of exhaustion and nothing can possibly come in before April. To-day, in my perplexity, I took an elevated train and journeyed southward into the region of money. What I should do there I hardly knew, but a nameless inner necessity seemed to be driving me to do something. I had a vague notion of consulting with Carmichael. But when I came into lower Broadway and was actually at Carmichael’s door, I fled in disgust with myself for the sufficiently transparent reason that I really had nothing to say to him. I felt like a debutant pickpocket who turns back abruptly from the threshold of his calling because he realizes the absence of a vocation or is overcome by cowardice. In the street I looked upon the driving masses of people, swarming, streaming, with strained faces, urged on by invisible whips of need, of desire, driven like the souls in Dante’s hell by demoniac powers who ever cry, "Pay your way! pay your way!" They did not hear the cry now, the continual snapping of the infernal whips, but I heard them and I quaked inwardly. To myself I fancied the most of these surging figures upon a level of life that has few problems, that is always "happy" with the dull unexultant happiness of the slave or the captive, coming briskly to the office of a morning with a sort of tarnished metallic gayety, lunching at Childs’ or at a counter unprovided with stools, clinging to a strap in a car jammed with their kind, visiting a motion-picture "palace" in the evening and living within their incomes because they must. And though all the rest was abhorrent, that last detail made me envy them.