Curiously enough this happy accident had come from the most unexpected
source. I had tried and failed at many things since leaving the
University. I had corrected proofs in a publishing office, I had
prepared backward youths for their exams, and after attempting life in
a broker's office downtown, for which I was as little fitted as I
should have been for the conquest of the Polar regions, I found myself
one fine morning down to my last few dollars, walking the streets with
an imminent prospect of speedy starvation. The fact of death, as an
alternative to the apparently actual, did not disconcert me. I
shouldn't have minded dying in the least, were it not for the fact
that I had hoped before that event to have expounded for modern
consumption certain theories of mine upon the dialectics of Hegel. As
my money dwindled I was reduced to quite necessary economies, and
while not what may be called a heavy eater, I am willing to admit
that there were times when I felt distinctly empty. Curiously enough,
my philosophy did little to relieve me of that physical condition, for
as someone has said, "Philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an
arrant jade on a journey."

But it seems that the journeying of my jade was near its ending. For
upon this morning, fortune threw me into the way of a fellow who had
been in my class at the University, who was to be my _deus ex
machina_. No two persons in the world could have been more dissimilar
than "Jack" Ballard and I, and yet, perhaps for that reason, there had
always been a kind of affinity between us. He was one of the
wealthiest men in my class and was now, as he gleefully informed me,
busily engaged clipping coupons in his father's office, "with office
hours from two to three some Thursdays." Of course, that was his idea
of a joke, for it seems quite obvious that a person who gave so little