painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts"
that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling
brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking
paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert
hands had traced the warning, not: "Abandon hope all ye who enter
here," but: "Furnished rooms to let with board." And pursuing this grim
trail of memory, whether he would or no--again he climbed, wearily at
the end of a wearing day, a darksome well of a staircase up and up to
an eyrie under the eaves, denominated in the terminology of landladies
a "top hall back"--a cramped refuge haunted by pitiful ghosts of the
hopes and despairs of its former tenants. And he remembered with
reminiscently aching muscles the comfort of such a "single bed" as is
peculiar (one hopes) to top hall backs, and with a qualm what it was to
cook a surreptitious meal on a metal heater clamped to the gas-bracket
(with ears keen to catch the scuffle of the landlady's feet as she
skulked in the hall, jealous of her gas bill).

And to this he must return, to that treadmill round of blighted days
and joyless nights must set his face....

Alighting at the Grand Central Station he packed the double weight of
his luggage and his cares a few blocks northward on Madison Avenue ere
turning west toward the bachelor rooms which Kellogg had established in
the roaring Forties, just the other side of _the_ Avenue--Fifth
Avenue, on a corner of which Duncan presently was held up for a time by
a press of traffic. He lingered indifferently, waiting for the mounted
policeman to clear a way across, watching the while with lack-lustre
eyes the interminable procession of cabs and landaus, taxis and
town-cars that romped by hazardously, crowding the street from curb to
curb.