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ther days he had felt almost sorry for the house, humiliated now by pigeon droppings and candy wrappers, by discarded cigarette packages and empty bottles that had once held cheap wine and now gleamed dully in the barren hedge. Today he was concerned only with his personal humiliation.
He hurried up the warped stairs to the tenement and let himself in. The door opened from the hall directly into the kitchen, a shabby room with a chromium dinette set looking out of place against oak wainscoting. There was a scattering of dirty dishes on the table. A plate of margarine had half melted into a greasy yellow pool and the bitter smell of reboiled coffee was in the air.
Morlock called, "Lolly?" There was no answer. Lolly--the name which had once denoted affection--now choked in his throat. She was probably downstairs, he decided, and walked into the living room. There was a desk in the room that he used for his own work. She used a drawer in a cheap end table for her correspondence. Morlock opened the drawer and took out an untidy stack of envelopes.
She had made no effort to conceal the mess she had made of their finances. The letters were all there. A slim pile from a department store. Will you please remit? A thicker pile from the appliance store that Morlock had just left. He read through them swiftly. Polite, at first, then insistent. Some of them quite clever in the manner in which they expressed dismay that a trusted customer could so badly disillusion them. From the gas and electric companies there were past-due notices but no letters. They hardly had to dun, Morlock reflected ruefully.
He sat wearily at his own desk after he had gone through the correspondence. In the last hour, the thought that he owed almost eight hundred dollars which he had promised to pay by morning had recurred to him a half dozen times, but with no lessening of its impact. He was stunned, overwhelmed by the personal disaster that had had its beginning only this morning when the hall monitor brought hi