Nothing made any difference.  Gradually his mind grew more and more clouded; he became stupid, sluggish.  He went about the city from dawn to dark, his feet dragging, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the motion of his gait.  He rarely spoke; his eyes took on a dull, glazed appearance, filmy, like the eyes of a dead fish.  At certain intervals his mania came upon him, the strange hallucination of something four-footed, the persistent fancy that the brute in him had now grown so large, so insatiable, that it had taken everything, even to his very self, his own identity—­that he had literally become the brute.  The attack passed off and left him wondering, perplexed.

The Reno House, where Vandover had lived for some fifteen months, was a sort of hotel on Sacramento Street below Kearney.  The neighbourhood was low—­just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, abounding in stores for second-hand clothing, saloons, pawnshops, gun-stores, bird-stores, and the shops of Chinese cobblers.  Around the corner on Kearney Street was a concert hall, a dive, to which the admission was free.  Near by was the old Plaza.

Underneath the hotel on the ground floor were two saloons, a barber shop, and a broom manufactory.  The lodgers themselves were for the most part “transients,” sailors lounging about shore between two voyages, Swedes and Danes, farmhands, grape-pickers, and cow-punchers from distant parts of the state, a few lost women, and Japanese cooks and second-boys remaining there while they advertised for positions.

Vandover sank to the grade of these people at once with that fatal adaptability to environment which he had permitted himself to foster throughout his entire life, and which had led him to be contented in almost any circumstances.  It was as if the brute in him were forever seeking a lower level, wallowing itself lower and lower into the filth and into the mire, content to be foul, content to be prone, to be inert and supine.

It was Saturday morning about a quarter of nine.  The wet season had begun early that year.  Though this was but the middle of September, the rain had fallen steadily since the previous Wednesday.  Its steady murmur, prolonged and soothing like the purring of a great cat, filled Vandover’s room with a pleasant sound.  The air of the room was thick and foul, heavy with the odour of cooking, onions, and stale bedding.  It was very warm; there was no ventilation.  Vandover lay upon the bed half awake, dozing under the thick coarse blankets and soiled counterpane.  With the exception of his shoes and coat he wore all his clothes.  He was glad to be warm, to be stupefied by the heat of the bedding and the bad air of the room.