There seemed to be no end to our good luck that morning. After a right royal breakfast we got still another belated pavement to clean, and when we had finished that our joint earnings made the sumptuous total of one dollar and fifty cents, and we were not hungry. It was a delightful walk back to the familiar lodging-house, where we paid for a night’s lodging in advance, and so secured immediate access to the washing and cleaning facilities of the establishment. When we set forth again Clark looked fairly trim. His clothes were well brushed and his boots were clean. He had been shaven, and his face glowed with healthful exercise and the effects of nourishing, sustaining food. We had been in conversation on the subject of going to church. Clark opposed it warmly; besides, he had another plan. There were certain foremen whom he was bent on seeing in the unoccupied quiet of Sunday, in relation to the matter of a possible job. “And I don’t take no stock in church, anyway,” he explained. “Fellows like us ain’t expected there, and we ain’t wanted. If you ain’t dressed in the style, you’re different from everybody else that’s there, and there ain’t no fun in that. And if you do go, what do you hear? Sometimes a preacher talks sense, and makes things reasonable to you, but most of them talks rot, that you don’t believe nor they either. I’d sooner read Tom Paine than hear all the preachers in this town. He talks to you straight, in a way you can understand.” I pleaded my knowledge of a preacher who would talk to us as “straight” as Tom Paine, but to no purpose, for there remained the question of dress. Then I urged our going to mass, where we should not be embarrassed by our singularity; but this plea met with no favor at all, and I was obliged to go alone to church, and did not see Clark again until we met late in the evening at the lodging-house. It was snowing fast at the end of the service-hour, giving high promise of abundant work in the morning. On the strength of it I ate a fifteen-cent dinner with a twofold feeling of satisfaction. Then I began a diligent search for the place of meeting of the Socialists. Sunday afternoon, I had learned, was their time of meeting. A knowledge of the place was wanting, but only because it had not occurred to me to look for an announcement of it in the newspapers of the day before. And this was wholly indicative of my general frame of mind in the connection. My preconceptions were strong. I had vision of a bare, dimly lighted room in the far recess of an unfrequented building, a room reached by dusty stairs and long, dark corridors, closely guarded by sentries, whose duty was to demand the countersign from those who entered and to give warning of danger in an emergency, so that the inmates might escape by secret passages to the street.