I knew Dobbs for six months! Day after day I saw him come at three o’clock in the morning. I saw his pale face, and that coat so audacious in its fineness, go to the press-room, fold his papers, and hurry out into the weather. One night I stopped him.
“Dobbs,” says I, “how much do you make a week?”
“I average five dollars and twenty cents, sir. I have twenty-seven regular customers. I get the paper at fifteen cents a week from you, and sell it to them at twenty-five cents. I make two dollars and seventy cents off of them, and then I sell about twenty-five extra papers a morning.”
“What do you do with your money?”
“It takes nearly all of it to support me and mother.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that you and your mother live on five dollars and twenty cents a week?”
“Yes, sir, we do, and pay five dollars a month rent out of that. We live pretty well, too,” with a smile, possibly induced by the vision of some of those luxuries which were included under the head of “living pretty well.” I was crushed!
Five dollars and twenty-five cents a week! The sum which I waste per week upon cigars. The paltry amount which I pay almost any night at the theater. The sum that I spend any night I may chance to strike a half-dozen boon companions. This sum, so contemptible to me—wasted so lightly—I find to be the sum total of the income of a whole family—the whole support of two human beings.
I left Dobbs, humiliated and crushed. I pulled my hat over my eyes, strolled down to Mercer’s, and bought a twenty-five cent cigar and sat down to think over my duty in the premises.