FROM THE LIFE
about in his broken summer shoes. And he was not merely indifferent to the rain—he felt affectionate toward it. The men and women whom he passed were protected against the wet with umbrellas and waterproofs, as if against an enemy. They were apparently as afraid of the rain as they were of poverty. And to Carey poverty was an old familiar, and the rain, as the poets say, caressed his face with a pleasant coolness. He was footsore, and the water in his shoes was even refreshing. He had fought against poverty once with a desperate fear of it, like a man drowning. And now he had sunk to the depths, he was one of "the submerged tenth," and it was as if he had touched bottom and found that he could live and breathe there, peacefully. Poverty!—what fools people were about it. And the rain!—the world had refused him a shelter from either, and neither had proved to be a hardship.
He had a room on the top floor of an old house on the south side of Washington Square. It was a house that had been sold to make way for a new building, and some hitch in finances had halted the project after all the tenants had been moved out and the gas-pipes had been disconnected. Carey had hung on, alone, with a kerosene-lamp and an oil-stove on which he did his cooking. He expected any day to come home and find the house- wreckers at work and his staircase gone. As he rounded the Washington Arch he looked up, mechanically, to see whether his roof was still whole.
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