fices, railroad freight offices, wondering whether in any of these it
would be possible for him to obtain a position which would give him a
salary of ten dollars a week. If he could get that, and any of the
pictures now on show with Jacob Bergman, Henry LaRue and Pottle Freres
should be sold, he could get along. He might even live on this with
Angela if he could sell an occasional picture for ten or fifteen
dollars. But he was paying seven dollars a week for nothing save food
and room, and scarcely managing to cling to the one hundred dollars
which had remained of his original traveling fund after he had paid all
his opening expenses here in New York. He was afraid to part with all
his pictures in this way for fear he would be sorry for it after a
while.

Work is hard to get under the most favorable conditions of health and
youth and ambition, and the difficulties of obtaining it under
unfavorable ones need not be insisted on. Imagine if you can the crowds
of men, forty, fifty, one hundred strong, that wait at the door of every
drygoods employment office, every street-car registration bureau, on the
special days set aside for considering applications, at every factory,
shop or office where an advertisement calling for a certain type of man
or woman was inserted in the newspapers. On a few occasions that Eugene
tried or attempted to try, he found himself preceded by peculiar groups
of individuals who eyed him curiously as he approached, wondering, as he
thought, whether a man of his type could be coming to apply for a job.
They seemed radically different from himself to his mind, men with
little education and a grim consciousness of the difficulties of life;
young men, vapid looking men, shabby, stale, discouraged types--men who,
like himself, looked as though they had seen something very much better,
and men who looked as though they had seen things a great deal worse.
The evidence which frightened him was the presence of a group of bright,
healthy, eager looking boys of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and
twenty-two who, like himself when he first went to Chicago years before,
were everywhere he went. When he drew near he invariably found it
impossible to indicate in any way that he was looking for anything. He
couldn't. His courage failed him; he felt that he looked too superior;
self-consciousness and shame overcame him.

He learned now that men rose as early as four o'clock in the morning to
buy a newspaper and ran qu