Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

When the Sinclairs came to New York in 1888, they had not quite left the South -- for they stayed, at first, for a year or two, in a "Southern" hotel on West 19th Street. It is described in _Love's Pilgrimage_ as inhabited by musty phantoms of the dead Southern past -- "old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were ‘belles' and young gentlemen who aspired to be ‘blades'. It was a world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to Thyrsis. this dead Aristocracy cried aloud for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and gossipped their way through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated them, and feared them. Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial poverty -- the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at ‘bridge' and ‘poker', and pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all. There was scarcely over a week when this canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last year's clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more hopeless."