The city had provided three or four chairs there, a
stove, and two tables. Dane had little literature, but,
as he was in the literary line himself, he did not
care for this so much; men who write books are not
commonly eager to read books which are worse than their
own. At a nine-cent window of a neighboring tinman's he
was able to buy himself the few little necessities which
he wanted for housekeeping. And not to detain the reader
too long upon merely fleshly arrangements, in the course
of a couple of hours of Tuesday evening and Wednesday
evening, he had fitted up his convenient if not pretty
bower with all that man requires. It was easy to buy a
mince pie or a cream cake, or a bit of boiled ham or
roast chicken, according as payday was near or distant.
One is glad to have a tablecloth. But if one have a
large poster warning people, a year before, that they
should vote the Prohibition ticket, one's conscience is
not wounded if this poster, ink down, takes the place
which a tablecloth would have taken under other
circumstances. If there is not much crockery to use,
there is but little to wash. And, in short, as well
trained a man of the world as Dane had made himself
thoroughly comfortable in his new quarters before the
week was over.
II
At the beginning Frederick's views were purely
personal, or, as the preachers say, selfish.
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