He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his
pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that
it marked a crisis--the complete, the acute consciousness of his
personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an
evening. At this particular establishment the _Schoppen_ were very tall
and the beer was very good; and as the host and most of the guests were
German, and their colloquial tongue was unknown to him, he was not drawn
into any undue expenditure of speech. He watched his smoke and he
thought, thought so hard that at last he appeared to himself to have
exhausted the thinkable. When this moment of combined relief and dismay
arrived (on the last of the evenings that we are concerned with), he
took his way down Third Avenue and reached his humble dwelling. Till
within a short time there had been a resource for him at such an hour
and in such a mood; a little variety-actress, who lived in the house,
and with whom he had established the most cordial relations, was often
having her supper (she took it somewhere, every night, after the
theatre) in the dim, close dining-room, and he used to drop in and talk
to her. But she had lately married, to his great amusement, and her
husband had taken her on a wedding-tour, which was to be at the same
time professional.
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