Street to the foot of Liberty was two dollars and a half, and the
fruit and flowers came to twenty-two dollars. He was greatly
distressed over this, and could not see how it had happened. He rode
back in the elevated for five cents and felt much better. Then some
men just back from a yachting trip joined him at the club and ordered
a great many things to drink, and of course he had to do the same, and
seven dollars were added to his economy fund. He argued that this did
not matter, because he signed a check for it, and that he would not
have to pay for it until the end of the month, when the necessity of
economizing would be over.

Still, his conscience did not seem convinced, and he grew very
desperate. He felt he was not doing it at all properly, and he
determined that he would spend next to nothing on his dinner. He
remembered with a shudder the place he had taken the tramp to dinner,
and he vowed that before he would economize as rigidly as that he
would starve; but he had heard of the _table d'hôte_ places on Sixth
Avenue, so he went there and wandered along the street until he found
one that looked clean and nice. He began with a heavy soup, shoved a
rich, fat, fried fish over his plate, and followed it with a queer
_entrée_ of spaghetti with a tomato dressing that satisfied his hunger
and killed his appetite as if with the blow of a lead pipe. But he
went through with the rest of it, for he felt it was the truest
economy to get his money's worth, and the limp salad in bad oil and
the ice-cream of sour milk made him feel that eating was a positive
pain rather than a pleasure; and in this state of mind and body,
drugged and disgusted, he lighted his pipe and walked slowly towards
the club along Twenty-sixth Street.

He looked in at the _café_ at Delmonico's with envy and disgust, and,