ll not know its own defeat.

They were beaten; they had lost the game, they were swept aside. It
was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with
wages and grocery bills and rents. They had dreamed of freedom; of a
chance to look about them and learn something; to be decent and clean,
to see their child grow up to be strong. And now it was all gone--it
would never be! They had played the game and they had lost. Six years
more of toil they had to face before they could expect the least
respite, the cessation of the payments upon the house; and how cruelly
certain it was that they could never stand six years of such a life as
they were living! They were lost, they were going down--and there was
no deliverance for them, no hope; for all the help it gave them the vast
city in which they lived might have been an ocean waste, a wilderness, a
desert, a tomb. So often this mood would come to Ona, in the nighttime,
when something wakened her; she would lie, afraid of the beating of her
own heart, fronting the blood-red eyes of the old primeval terror of
life. Once she cried aloud, and woke Jurgis, who was tired and cross.
After that she learned to weep silently--their moods so seldom came
together now! It was as if their hopes were buried in separate graves.

Jurgis, being a man, had troubles of his own. There was another specter
following him. He had never spoken of it, nor would he allow any one
else to speak of it--he had never acknowledged its existence to himself.
Yet the battle with it took all the manhood that he had--and once or
twice, alas, a little more. Jurgis had discovered drink.

He was working in the steaming pit of hell; day after day, week after
week--until now, there was not an organ of his body that did its work
without pain, until the sound of ocean breakers echoed in his head day
and night, and the buildings swayed and danced before him as he went
down the street. And from all the unending horror of this there was a
respite, a deliverance--he could drink! He could forget the pain, he
could slip off the burden; he would see clearly again, he would be
master of his brain, of his thoughts, of his will. His dead self would
stir in him, and he would find himself laughing and cracking jokes with
his companions--he would be a man again, and master of his life.

It was not an easy thing for Jurgis to take more than two or three
drinks. With the first drink he could eat a meal, and he could p