and banded little creatures of the class. Before his first month was out, he had paid desperately for his ignorance of their customs.
Eliza boiled herself out at the baths daily; sometimes, he went along with her, leaving her with a sensation of drunken independence, while he went into the men’s quarters, stripping himself in a cool room, entering thence a hot one lined with couches, shutting himself in a steam-closet where he felt himself momentarily dwindling into the raining puddle of sweat at his feet, to emerge presently on trembling legs and to be rolled and kneaded about magnificently in a huge tub by a powerful grinning negro. Later, languorous, but with a feeling of deep purification, he lay out on one of the couches, victoriously his own man in a man’s world. They talked from couch to couch, or walked pot-belliedly about, sashed coyly with bath towels—malarial Southerners with malarial drawls, paunch-eyed alcoholics, purple-skinned gamblers, and broken down prize-fighters. He liked the smell of steam and of the sweaty men.
Eliza sent him out on the streets at once with The Saturday Evening Post.
“It won’t hurt you to do a little light work after school,” said she. And as he trudged off with his sack slung from his neck, she would call after him:
“Spruce up, boy! Spruce up! Throw your shoulders back. Make folks think you’re somebody.” And she gave him a pocketful of printed cards, which bore this inscription:
SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT
DIXIELAND
In Beautiful Altamont,
America’s Switzerland.
Rates Reasonable—Both Transient and Tourist.
Apply Eliza E. Gant, Prop.
“You’ve got to help me drum up some trade, if we’re to live, boy,” she said again, with the lip-pursing, mouth-tremulous jocularity
