Explore "A Good-For-Nothing" by Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The first three months of Ralph's sojourn in America were spent in vain / attempts to obtain a situation. Day after day he walked down Broadway, / calling at various places of business and night after night he returned / to his cheerless room with a faint heart and declining spirits. It was, / after all, a more serious thing than he had imagined, to cut the cable / which binds one to the land of one's birth. There a hundred subtile / influences, the existence of which no one suspects until the moment they / are withdrawn, unite to keep one in the straight path of rectitude, or / at least of external respectability; and Ralph's life had been all in / society; the opinion of his fellow-men had been the one force to which / he implicitly deferred, and the conscience by which he had been wont / to test his actions had been nothing but the aggregate judgment of his / friends. To such a man the isolation and the utter irresponsibility of a / life among strangers was tenfold more dangerous; and Ralph found, to his / horror, that his character contained innumerable latent possibilities / which the easygoing life in his home probably never would have revealed / to him.
It often cut him to the quick, when, on entering an office in / his daily search for employment, he was met by hostile or suspicious / glances, or when, as it occasionally happened, the door was slammed in / his face, as if he were a vagabond or an impostor. Then the wolf was / often roused within him, and he felt a momentary wild desire to become / what the people here evidently believed him to be. Many a night he / sauntered irresolutely about the gambling places in obscure streets, / and the glare of light, the rude shouts and clamors in the same moment / repelled and attracted him. If he went to the devil, who would care? His / father had himself pointed out the way to him; and nobody could blame / him if he followed the advice. But then again a memory emerged from that / chamber of his soul which still he held sacred; and Bertha's deep-blue / eyes gazed upon him with their earnest look of tender warning and / regret.