The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

Ray carried his bag himself when he left the elevated road, and resisted / the offer of the small Italian dodging about his elbow, and proposing to / take it, after he had failed to get Ray to let him black his boots. The / young man rather prided himself on his thrift in denying the boy, whose / naked foot came half through one of his shoes; he saw his tatters and / nakedness with the indifference of inexperience, and with his country / breeding he considered his frugality a virtue. His senses were not / offended by the foulness of the streets he passed through, or hurt by / their sordid uproar; his strong young nerves were equal to all the / assaults that the city could make; and his heart was lifted in a dream / of hope. He was going to a hotel that Sanderson had told him of, where / you could get a room, on the European plan, for seventy-five cents, and / then eat wherever you pleased; he had gone to an American hotel when he / was in New York before, and he thought he could make a saving by trying / Sanderson's. It had a certain gayety of lamps before it, but the / splendor diminished within, and Ray's pride was further hurt by the / clerk's exacting advance payment for his room from him. The clerk said / he could not give him an outside room that night, but he would try to / change him in the morning; and Ray had either to take the one assigned / him or go somewhere else.

But he had ordered his trunk sent to this / hotel by the express, and he did not know how he should manage about / that if he left; so he staid, and had himself shown to his room. It / seemed to be a large cupboard in the wall of the corridor; but it had a / window near the bed, and the usual equipment of stand and bureau, and / Ray did not see why he should not sleep very well there. Still, he was / glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that / room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next / day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with / the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried / through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any / other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the / basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper. / When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door, / but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run / after him, and who said, "You didn't pay for your supper."

Ray said, "Oh, I forgot it," and he went back to his table and got his / check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the / man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse / apologies. Apparently they were too used to such tricks at that / restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe / him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried / to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He / was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at / every moment he got he reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring / the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the / style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him / homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly / in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a / little of Sanderson's cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come / to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of / the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his / story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at / Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he / used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New / York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it / cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a / publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the / night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters / for the Midland _Echo_; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he / wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting / him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet / he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five / dollars a week.

He determined to begin a letter to the _Echo_ at once; and he went to / open the window to give himself some air in the close room; but he found / that it would not open. He pulled down the transom over his door to keep / from stifling in the heat of his gas-burner, and some voices that had / been merely a dull rumbling before now made themselves heard in talk / which Ray could not help listening to.

Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a / vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep / base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke / nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy / bell.

"No," he said; "I'd better fail, Bill. It's no use trying to keep along. / I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know / me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the / dollar, I guess, and that's more than most business men could, if they / stopped; and if I ever get goin' again, I'll pay dollar for dollar; they / know that."