one edges away from the other because he finds him a little warm.  It ’s dangerous when you ’re not used to it; but once you go through the parching process, you become inoculated against further contagion.  Now, there ’s Barney over there, as decent a fellow as I know; but he has been indicted twice for pocket-picking.  A half-dozen fellows whom you meet here every night have killed their man.  Others have done worse things for which you respect them less.  Poor Wallace, who is just coming in, and who looks like a jaunty ragpicker, came here about six months ago with about two thousand dollars, the proceeds from the sale of a house his father had left him.  He ’ll sleep in one of the club chairs to-night, and not from choice.  He spent his two thousand learning.  But, after all, it was a good investment.  It was like buying an annuity.  He begins to know already how to live on others as they have lived on him.  The plucked bird’s beak is sharpened for other’s feathers.  From now on Wallace will live, eat, drink, and sleep at the expense of others, and will forget to mourn his lost money.  He will go on this way until, broken and useless, the poor-house or the potter’s field gets him.  Oh, it ’s a fine, rich life, my lad.  I know you ’ll like it.  I said you would the first time I saw you.  It has plenty of stir in it, and a man never gets lonesome.  Only the rich are lonesome.  It ’s only the independent who depend upon others.”

Sadness laughed a peculiar laugh, and there was a look in his terribly bright eyes that made Joe creep.  If he could only have understood all that the man was saying to him, he might even yet have turned back.  But he did n’t.  He ordered another drink.  The only effect that the talk of Sadness had upon him was to make him feel wonderfully “in it.”  It gave him a false bravery, and he mentally told himself that now he would not be afraid to face Hattie.

He put out his hand to Sadness with a knowing look.  “Thanks, Sadness,” he said, “you ’ve helped me lots.”

Sadness brushed the proffered hand away and sprung up.  “You lie,” he cried, “I have n’t; I was only fool enough to try;” and he turned hastily away from the table.

Joe looked surprised at first, and then laughed at his friend’s retreating form.  “Poor old fellow,” he said, “drunk again.  Must have had something before he came in.”

There was not a lie in all that Sadness had said either as to their crime or their condition.  He belonged to a peculiar class,—­one that grows larger and larger each year in New York and which has imitators in every large city in this country.  It is a set which lives, like the leech, upon the blood of others,—­that draws its life from the veins of foolish men and immoral women, that prides itself upon its well-dressed idleness and has no shame in its voluntary pauperism.  Each member of the class knows every other, his methods and his limitations, and their loyalty one to another makes of them a great hulking, fashionably uniformed fraternity of indolence.  Some play the races a few months of the year; others, quite as intermittently, gamble at “shoestring” politics, and waver from party to party as time or their interests seem to dictate.  But mostly they are like the lilies of the field.