th passed. I subscribed to an employment bureau, but the
only offer I received was to act as a sort of bouncer in a barroom. I
suppose my height and weight and reputation for sobriety recommended
me there. There was five dollars a week in it, and as far as I alone
was concerned I would have taken it. That sum would at least buy
bread, and though it may sound incredible the problem of getting
enough to eat was fast becoming acute. The provision men became daily
more suspicious. We cut down on everything, but I knew it was only a
question of time when they would refuse to extend our credit for the
little we _had_ to have. And all around me my neighbors went their
cheerful ways and waited for me to work it out. But whenever I thought
of the barroom job and the money it would bring I could see them shake
their heads.

It was hell. It was the deepest of all deep hells--the middle-class
hell. There was nothing theatrical about it--no fireworks or red
lights. It was plain, dull, sodden. Here was my position: work in my
own class I couldn't get; work as a young man I was too old to get;
work as just plain physical labor these same middle-class neighbors
refused to allow me to undertake. I couldn't black my neighbors' boots
without social ostracism, though Pasquale, who kept the stand in the
United Woollen building, once confided to me that he cleared some
twenty-five dollars a week. I couldn't mow my neighbors' front lawns
or deliver milk at their doors, though there was food in it. That was
honest work--clean work; but if I attempted it would they play golf
with me? Personally I didn't care. I would have taken a job that day.
But there were the wife and boy. They were held in ransom. It's all
very well to talk about scorning the conventions, to philosophize
about the dignity of honest work, to quote "a man's a man for a'
that"; but associates of their own kind mean more to a woman and a
growing boy than they do to a man. At least I thought so at that time.
When I saw my wife surrounded by well-bred, well-dressed women, they
seemed to me an essential part of her life. What else did living mean
for her? When my boy brought home with him other boys of his age and
kind--though to me they did not represent the highest type--I felt
under obligations to retain those friends for him. I had begot him
into this set. It seemed barbarous to do anything that would allow
them to point the finger at him.

I felt a yearning for some primeva