en whom he knew best, Ellis, Geary, and young Haight, were in
nowise changed. He was no longer invited anywhere, and the girls he had
known never saw him when he passed them on the street. It was
humiliating enough at first, but he got used to it after a while, and by
dint of thrusting the disagreeable subject from his thoughts, by
refusing to let the disgrace sink deep in his mind, by forgetting the
whole business as much as he could, he arrived after a time to be
passably contented. His pliable character had again rearranged itself to
suit the new environment.

Along with this, however, came a sense of freedom. Now he no longer had
anything to fear from society; it had shot its bolt, it had done its
worst, there was no longer anything to restrain him, now he could do
anything.

He was in precisely this state of mind when he received the cards for
the opening of the roadhouse, the "resort" out on the Almshouse drive,
about which Toby, the waiter at the Imperial, had spoken to him.

Vandover attended it. It was a debauch of forty-eight hours, the longest
and the worst he had ever indulged in. For a long time the brute had
been numb and dormant; now at last when he woke he was raging, more
insatiable, more irresistible than ever.

The affair at the roadhouse was but the beginning. All at once Vandover
rushed into a career of dissipation, consumed with the desire of vice,
the perverse, blind, and reckless desire of the male. Drunkenness,
sensuality, gambling, debauchery, he knew them all. He rubbed elbows
with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the
exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his
first name, the policemen, the night detail, were familiar with his
face, the drivers of the nighthawks recognized his figure by the street
lamps, paling in the light of many an early dawn. At one time and
another he was associated with all the different types of people in the
low "sporting set," acquaintances of an evening, whose names grew faint
to his recollection amidst the jingle of glasses and the popping of
corks, whose faces faded from his memory in the haze of tobacco smoke
and the fumes of whisky; young men of the city, rich without apparent
means of livelihood, women and girls "recently from the East" with rooms
over the fast restaurants; owners of trotting horses, actresses without
engagements, billiard-markers, pool-sellers and the sons of the
proprietors of halfway ho