Hurstwood was now hot and waked up.It was a great shaking up for him, both mental and moral.He wiped his brow as he looked around, and then went for his clothes and dressed.Not a sound came from Carrie; she ceased sobbing when she heard him dressing.
She thought, at first, with the faintest alarm, of being left without money--not of losing him, though he might be going away permanently.She heard him open the top of the wardrobe and take out his hat.Then the dining-room door closed, and she knew he had gone.
After a few moments of silence, she stood up, dry-eyed, and looked out the window.Hurstwood was just strolling up the street, from the flat, toward Sixth Avenue.
The latter made progress along Thirteenth and across Fourteenth Street to Union Square.
"Look for work!" he said to himself."Look for work! She tells me to get out and look for work."
He tried to shield himself from his own mental accusation, which told him that she was right.
"What a cursed thing that Mrs.Vance's call was, anyhow," he thought."Stood right there, and looked me over.I know what she was thinking."
He remembered the few times he had seen her in Seventy-eight Street.She was always a swell-looker, and he had tried to put on the air of being worthy of such as she, in front of her.Now, to think she had caught him looking this way.He wrinkled his forehead in his distress.
"The devil!" he said a dozen times in an hour.
It was a quarter after four when he left the house.Carrie was in tears.There would be no dinner that night.
"What the deuce," he said, swaggering mentally to hide his own shame from himself."I'm not so bad.I'm not down yet."
He looked around the square, and seeing the several large hotels, decided to go to one for dinner.He would get his papers and make himself comfortable there.
He ascended into the fine parlour of the Morton House, then one of the best New York hotels, and, finding a cushioned seat, read.
It did not trouble him much that his decreasing sum of money did not allow of such extravagance.Like the morphine fiend, he was becoming addicted to his ease.Anything to relieve his mental distress, to satisfy his craving for comfort.He must do it.No thoughts for the morrow--he could not stand to think of it any more than he could of any other calamity.Like the certainty of death, he tried to shut the certainty of soon being without a dollar completely out of his mind, and he came very near doing it.
Well-dressed guests moving to and fro over the thick carpets carried him back to the old days.A young lady, a guest of the house, playing a piano in an alcove pleased him.He sat there reading.
His dinner cost him $1.50.By eight o'clock he was through, and then, seeing guests leaving and the crowd of pleasure-seekers thickening outside wondered where he should go.Not home.
Carrie would be up.No, he would not go back there this evening.
He would stay out and knock around as a man who was independent--
not broke--well might.He bought a cigar, and went outside on the corner where other individuals were lounging--brokers, racing people, thespians--his own flesh and blood.As he stood there, he thought of the old evenings in Chicago, and how he used to dispose of them.Many's the game he had had.This took him to poker.
"I didn't do that thing right the other day," he thought, referring to his loss of sixty dollars."I shouldn't have weakened.I could have bluffed that fellow down.I wasn't in form, that's what ailed me."