Chapter 29 Summary

Paddy and the narrator go to a Salvation Army shelter. The shelter is very different from the spike. It is clean and whitewashed, bare and without a fire. The people staying in the Salvation Army shelter are more respectable looking than those in the spikes.

The narrator thinks this shelter is drearier than any other place he's stayed because the people there seem so hopeless. He hears one young man ranting about getting a job the next day and later comes across him praying. He's struck by the man's face; he can tell that he's starving.

In the dormitories, a former Eton boy, now fifty and living at the Salvation Army shelter, can see that the narrator is an educated man and talks to him about sticking together. He is very drunk and talks in his sleep at night.

In the night, the...