Chip shrugged his shoulders with the habit acquired in French schools. "On fait ce que l'on peut. I had three resources left to me—wine, woman, and song. For song I've no ear; for woman—well, that's all over; so it came down to Hobson's choice."
"Hobson's choice be blowed! Walker's choice! And you've just time enough left to cast about for a set of alternatives. Why, I've seen scores of men in your fix; and of some of them it was the salvation."
"And what was it of the others?"
"Hell. But it was a hell of their own making."
"All right. I'm willing to accept the word. It's a hell of my own making—but it's hell, just the same."
"But, good Lord! man, even if it is hell, you don't want to wallow in it."
Chip smiled ruefully. "Oh, I like it. Kind of penance. I like it as medieval sinners used to like a hair shirt."
"Yes; but the hair shirt was kept out of sight. You're parading your penance, as you call it, before the world. See here, Walker, why don't you come up and spend the weekend with me in New Hampshire? My wife would like to have you. To-day is Friday, and I go up to-morrow morning. A Sunday in the country would do you good."
Chip refused, but he long remembered why he retracted his refusal. It was the look of his apartment when he returned to it that night. It was an apartment in a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and a street in the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that rooms in so comfortable a refuge should have been free for him. He had furnished them with some care; and after his first distress had worn off a little had found a measure of lawless satisfaction in a return to the old unmarried ways.
But on this particular evening the aspect of the place appalled him from the minute he turned his latch-key in the lock. Under the stimulus of Bland's counsels he had come home early, which was in itself a mistake. It was scarcely nine o'clock. There was an hour or an hour and a half to pass before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met him as an odor in the stale smell of the cigar he had smoked on coming up-town from the office, and which still lingered in the rooms. He had forgotten to open a window, and the house valet, whose duty it was to "tidy up," had evidently gone out.