together on another ticket. All that winter Kay and I wore no underwear but a vest. The bag and top hats were taken out and put in again regularly every week for many months. There was only one article that, selfishly, I could never pawn or sell--the fiddle.
Dried apples and hot water--with expensive oatmeal we had to be very sparing--constituted our dinner for four nights out of the week; coffee and bread and butter for breakfast, coffee and "sinkers" for lunch completed my dietary. Occasionally Boyde or Kay, having been invited to a meal, brought home something in their pockets, but not often. We felt hunger every day, only the evening dried apples and hot water giving a sense of repletion that yet did not really allay the pangs of appetite, though it stopped the dull gnawing until sleep finally obliterated it. Kay and I, but never Boyde, oddly enough, had vivid and amusing dreams of food, and one invariable topic of conversation every night as we dined at Krisch's, or gobbled apples and oatmeal, was the menu we would order when things improved.... But Krisch's, after a time, we found too difficult and tempting, with the good smells, the sight of people eating at other tables, the lager beer, the perfume of cigars; and many a time, with the price of a dinner in our pockets, we preferred to eat in our room.
Another topic of conversation was our plan, myself its enthusiastic creator, to take up land in Canada and lead the life of settlers in the backwoods, which by contrast to our present conditions seemed to promise a paradise. Occasionally Kay spouted bits of Shakespeare, or rehearsed a rôle in one of the plays his touring company was to give. But it was the talks with Boyde about Eastern ideas and philosophy that were my keenest pleasure, for his appreciation and sympathetic understanding were a delight I thought about with anticipatory eagerness even during the day. My attachment to him deepened into affection.
The weeks went by; we scraped along somehow;
Mrs. Bernstein was kept quiet--a relative term--by
