The first three months of Ralph's sojourn in
America were spent in vain attempts to obtain a
situation. Day after day he walked down
Broadway, calling at various places of business
and night after night he returned to his cheer-
less room with a faint heart and declining spirits.
It was, after all, a more serious thing than he
had imagined, to cut the cable which binds one
to the land of one's birth. There a hundred
subtile influences, the existence of which no one
suspects until the moment they are withdrawn,
unite to keep one in the straight path of rectitude,
or at least of external respectability; and
Ralph's life had been all in society; the opinion
of his fellow-men had been the one force to
which he implicitly deferred, and the conscience
by which he had been wont to test his actions
had been nothing but the aggregate judgment
of his friends. To such a man the isolation and
the utter irresponsibility of a life among
strangers was tenfold more dangerous; and Ralph
found, to his horror, that his character contained
innumerable latent possibilities which the easy-
going life in his home probably never would
have revealed to him. It often cut him to the
quick, when, on entering an office in his daily
search for employment, he was met by hostile
or suspicious glances, or when, as it occasionally