But a success
he was not. He knew that he was a brilliant failure--and not very
brilliant.
"Why is it?" he asked himself again and again in periods of reaction from
the nervous strain of some exciting experience. "Shall I never seize any of
these chances that are always thrusting themselves at me? Shall I always
act like a Neapolitan beggar? Will the stimulus to ambition never come?"
IV.
IN THE EDGE OF BOHEMIA.
Howard lived in Washington Square, South. He had gone to a "furnished-room
house" there because it was cheap. He staid because he was comfortable and
was without a motive for moving.
It was the centre of the most varied life in New York. To the north lay
fashion and wealth, to the east and west, respectability and moderate
means; to the south, poverty and squalor, vice and crime. All could be seen
and heard from the windows of his sitting room. In the evenings toward
spring he looked out upon a panorama of the human race such as is presented
by no other city in the world and by no other part of that city. Within
view were Americans of all kinds, French and Germans, Italians and
Austrians, Spaniards and Moors, Scandinavians and negroes, born New Yorkers
and born citizens of most of the capitals of civilisation and
semi-barbarism.
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