drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense
strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there
were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of
suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over
everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of
them; they laughed and danced and gossiped and drank their way
through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated
them and feared them. It was not by such that his destiny was to be
shaped.

Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and
artificial poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to
lose money at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their
self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid
what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they
owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those
who did not pay at all. There was scarcely ever a week when this
canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and
sordid struggle to make last year's clothing look like new, and to
find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There
was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every
year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more
hopeless.

There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above--the
thing that called itself "Society". And Thyrsis was a student and a
bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings
and flown away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and
memory held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and
craved his help; to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought