his unsettled religious beliefs, and the groping uncertainties of his attempts to find a place in a mad world. He walked the streets, day and night, with Margaret's letters in his pocket, the struggle for existence raging visibly around him, and the immense void of the sky overhead dwarfing his loneliness or oppressing, by its indifference, his hope.
It was the mark of his impracticality that he first grew easy in his mind about his merely worldly prospects; for, having earned a few dollars on the Bowery, he accepted them as confirming Walter Pittsey's assurance that it was always easy to find "something" to do; and he resigned himself to waiting idly for the theatrical season to begin. He idled in Central Park, trying to make himself familiar with all the puzzling turns of the labyrinth of walks in the "Ramble," or sitting to smile at the happiness of the children playing in the "Mall," or watching the contented swans floating above their inverted images in the sunlit still waters of the Ponds. He idled in the reading-room of the Astor Library, turning the thumbed pages of the illustrated magazines or drowsing over the philosophical and scientific essays on Assyrian inscriptions and the disputed authorship of the gospels and the latest experiments in the transmission of electrical energy without the use of wires. He idled in his room of an evening reading and re-reading the gossip of the newspapers, or sitting with empty eyes before his memories of Margaret—memories that were cast up in pictures of her on the drift of smoke in which he brooded; for he had begun to use tobacco.
