sought to find out where the registration office was. He did not lay
off his natural manner of superiority--could not, but asked a man near
him if he knew. It had taken all his courage to do this.

"He wouldn't be after lookin' fer a place as a conductor now, would he?"
he heard someone say within his hearing. For some reason this remark
took all his courage away. He went up the wooden stairs to the little
office where the application blanks were handed out, but did not even
have the courage to apply for one. He pretended to be looking for
someone and went out again. Later, before a drygoods superintendent's
office, he heard a youth remark, "Look what wants to be a clerk." It
froze him.

It is a question how long this aimless, nervous wandering would have
continued if it had not been for the accidental recollection of an
experience which a fellow artist once related to him of a writer who had
found himself nervously depressed and who, by application to the
president of a railroad, had secured as a courtesy to the profession
which he represented so ably a position as an apprentice in a surveying
corps, being given transportation to a distant section of the country
and employed at a laborer's wages until he was well. Eugene now thought
of this as quite an idea for himself. Why it had not occurred to him
before he did not know. He could apply as an artist--his appearance
would bear him out, and being able to speak from the vantage point of
personal ability temporarily embarrassed by ill health, his chances of
getting something would be so much better. It would not be the same as a
position which he had secured for himself without fear or favor, but it
would be a position, different from farming with Angela's father because
it would command a salary.

CHAPTER XIX

This idea of appealing to the president of one of the great railroads
that entered New York was not so difficult to execute. Eugene dressed
himself very carefully the next morning, and going to the office of the
company in Forty-second Street, consulted the list of officers posted in
one of the halls, and finding the president to be on the third floor,
ascended. He discovered, after compelling himself by sheer will power to
enter, that this so-called office was a mere anteroom to a force of
assistants serving the president, and that no one could see him except
by appointment.

"You might see his secretary if he isn't busy," suggested the clerk who
ha