Chapter 79

In a mean, miserable, two-dollar-a-week bedroom in a Chicago lodging-house a young man was calmly and deliberately preparing to kill himself. He possessed youth, health, affluence and comeliness--and yet he was preparing to kill himself. Calmly and deliberately. In the shabby room of a shabby hovel. With a penknife, he was ripping the bedclothes to ribbons and wedging them into chinks and crannies. At last satisfied that the room was as near gas-tight as he could make it, he stripped to his underclothing and sat do…