useless rag, into this dusty, sticky bench whence he was staring at the lighted window, high up.
He wondered what was behind it, and who?
Three days earlier he had come to New York with ten dollars—his last ten dollars—in his pocket. He had taken a room in this tenement-house, and every night he had sat on the bench and had stared at the warty, baroque façade.
Always it had been dark. Always the tenants, the hard-working people who lived there, had turned out their lights around ten o'clock with an almost military regularity that reminded him of barracks and a well-disciplined boarding-school.
He knew most of them. For they had talked to him, on stairs and landings and leaning from windows, with the easy garrulousness of the very poor who can't be snobs since they are familiar with each other's incomes and flesh-pots. They had lifted the crude-meshed veils of their hearts and hearths and had bidden him look—and all he had seen had been misery.
He checked the thought.
No! That wasn't true!
He had also seen love and friendship, and fine,
