A more extensive wardrobe, a little better food, a more
comfortable suite of rooms, an occasional dinner to some friends, loans to
broken-down reporters, and the mysteriously vanished two thousand dollars
was accounted for.
Howard tried to retrench, devised small ingenious schemes for saving money,
lectured himself severely and frequently for thus trifling away his chance
to be a free man. But all in vain. He remained poor; and, whenever he gave
the matter thought, which was not often, gloomy forebodings as to the
future oppressed him. "I shall find myself old," he thought, "with nothing
accomplished, with nothing laid by. I shall be an old drudge." He
understood the pessimistic tone of his profession. All about him were men
like himself--leading this gambler's life of feverish excitement and
evanescent achievement, earning comfortable incomes and saving nothing,
looking forward to the inevitable time of failing freshness and shattered
nerves and declining income.
He spasmodically tried to write stories for the magazines, contrived plots
for novels and plays, wrote first chapters, first scenes of first acts. But
the exactions of newspaper life, the impossibility of continuous effort at
any one piece of work and his natural inertia--he was inert but neither
idle nor lazy--combined to make futile his efforts to emancipate himself
from hand-to-mouth journalism.
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