Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/96

 in his ears and the shrill newsboys' cries and all the concentrated roar of the metropolis, he felt that he, too, was part of it all and that this was living, and he was a legitimate factor in the great economic machine; no longer an incumbrance but a wage-earner in the huge, struggling, pushing, shrieking thing they call the world, which is sordid and selfish but very interesting, and where he was jostled up against ever so many other workers, and would have been thrown down and trodden under foot if not able to cope with them. But he could cope with them and keep his head above, and was earning fifteen dollars a week, and lived in a hall-bedroom, top floor, back, with cats outside when he wanted to go to sleep at night, and a young actor in the next room who practised his lines in a would-be English accent, when Linton did not want to wake up in the morning.

And as for the uncle who had offered him a place in his office, not far from Park Row, and who complacently took it for granted that a chance for his own kind of success ought to be respectfully worshipped by Lin-