was left to him, but he snatched at everything.  He could not obtain the floor-walker position of which he had spoken to Anderson.  He thought that possibly his fine presence and urbane manner might recommend him for a place of that sort, but it was already filled.  He went to several of the great department stores and inquired if there was a vacancy.  He felt that the superintendents to whom he applied regarded his good points as he might have regarded the good points of a horse.  One of them told him that if he would give his address, he would be given the preference whenever a vacancy occurred.  Carroll knew that he was mentally appraised as a promising person to direct ladies to ribbon and muslin counters.  He looked at another floor-walker strutting up and down the aisle, and felt sure that he could do better, and all this amused contempt for himself deepened and bored its way into his very soul.  He always asked himself, with the demand of an unpitying judge, if he could not have done better for himself if he had begun at once; if he had not at the first failure drifted with no resistance, with the pleasant, easy, devil-may-careness which was in his nature along with the sterner stuff which was now upheaving and asserting itself, and taken what he could, how he could.  He had not, after all, had an absolutely unhappy home, although it had been founded on the sands, and although that iron of hatred of the man who had done him the wrong had been always in his soul.  The life he had led had been not one of active and voluntary preying upon his fellow-men; it had been only the life of one who must have the sweets of existence for himself and those he loved, and he had gotten them, even if the flowers and the fruit hung over the garden-walls of others.  Now it suddenly seemed to him that he could no longer do it, as he had done, even if the owners of the fruit and flowers should be still unawares.  Curiously enough, the old Pilgrim’s Progress which he had read as a child was very forcibly in his mind in these days.  He remembered the child that ate the fruit that hung over the wall, and how the gripes, in consequence, seized him.  Something very like the conviction of sin was over the man, or, rather, a complete consciousness of himself and his deeds, which is, maybe, after all, the true meaning of the term.  It was true that the self-knowledge had seemed to come, perforce, because it was temporarily out of his power to transgress farther; in other words, because he was completely found out; but all the same, the knowledge was there.  He saw himself just as he was, had been—­a great man goaded on always by the small, never-ceasing prick of hatred, with the sense of injury always stinging his soul, living as he chose, having all that he could procure, utterly careless whether at the expense and suffering of others or not.  Now, for the first time, he began to adjust himself in the place of others, and the adjusting produced torment from the realization