come to an end."

"Can't you start somewhere else?"

"There doesn't seem to be any place. Shaughnessy doesn't want to."

"Do you lose what you put in?"

"Yes," said Hurstwood, whose face was a study.

"Oh, isn't that too bad?" said Carrie.

"It's a trick," said Hurstwood. "That's all. They'll start another place
there all right."

Carrie looked at him, and gathered from his whole demeanour what it
meant. It was serious, very serious.

"Do you think you can get something else?" she ventured, timidly.

Hurstwood thought a while. It was all up with the bluff about money and
investment. She could see now that he was "broke."

"I don't know," he said solemnly; "I can try."

Chapter XXXIV. THE GRIND OF THE MILLSTONES--A SAMPLE OF CHAFF

Carrie pondered over this situation as consistently as Hurstwood, once
she got the facts adjusted in her mind. It took several days for her
to fully realise that the approach of the dissolution of her husband's
business meant commonplace struggle and privation. Her mind went back to
her early venture in Chicago, the Hansons and their flat, and her heart
revolted. That was terrible! Everything about poverty was terrible. She
wished she knew a way out. Her recent experiences with the Vances had
wholly unfitted her to view her own state with complacence. The glamour
of the high life of the city had, in the few experiences afforded her by
the former, seized her completely. She had been taught how to dress
and where to go without having ample means to do either. Now, these
things--ever-present realities as they were--filled her eyes and mind.
The more circumscribed became her state, the more entrancing seemed this
other. And now poverty threatened to seize her entirely and to remove
this other world far upward like a heaven to which any Lazarus might
extend, appealingly, his hands.

So, too, the ideal brought into her life by Ames remained. He had gone,
but here was his word that riches were not everything; that there was a
great deal more in the world than she knew; that the stage was good, and
the literature she read poor. He was a strong man and clean--how much
stronger and better than Hurstwood and Drouet she only half formulated
to herself, but the difference was painful. It was something to which
she voluntarily closed her eyes.

During the last three months of the Warren Street connection, Hurstwood
took parts of days off and hunted, tracking the business advertisements.