g to pass a stormier night
than was that night of his. Alternations between hope and
despair--fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild
pleadings with her--those delirious transports to which our imaginations
give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations--in the
security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it
all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness--her hair, her
skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form--He tossed about
until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake
it.

When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of
the boy entering the room. He reached for it with eager, trembling arm,
drew back. "Put it on the table," he said.

The boy left. He was alone. Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared
at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes. It contained his destiny. If
she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured. If
she refused, he would cease to struggle. He rose, took from a locked
drawer a bottle of rye whisky. He poured a tall glass--the kind called a
bar glass--half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a
quiver. The shock brought him up standing. He looked and acted like his
former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and
read:

"I am willing to marry you, if you really want me. I am so tired of
struggling, and I don't see anything but dark ahead.--D. H."

Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his
back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed. He felt the
blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of
flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until
nearly one o'clock.

To an outsider there would have been a world of homely commonplace
pathos in that little letter of the girl's if read aright, that is to
say, if read with what was between the lines supplied. It is impossible
to live in cities any length of time and with any sort of eyes without
learning the bitter unromantic truths about poverty--city poverty. In
quiet, desolate places one may be poor, very poor, without much
conscious suffering. There are no teasing contrasts, no torturing
temptations. But in a city, if one knows anything at all of the
possibilities of civilized life, of the joys and comforts of good food,
clothing, and shelter, of theater and concert and excursion, of
ente