I had found the orphanage again and I was home; I might just as well never have left home. After work, after my meal in the expensive drugstore, I would go back to my furnished room and I would bathe—what luxuries have the poor—and lie naked and powdered on my bed, covered with heat rash, reading the newspaper until I fell asleep. That way I passed three or four weeks, my mind sleeping on pointless calculations. I would spend an hour going over my budget, deciding on any particular night that I could reduce my expenses to no less than thirty-four dollars a week, which meant after all the pieces were taken from my pay, that I could never bank more than fifty dollars a month. So it would be six hundred dollars saved in a year, and after six years and eight months of dodging lobsters, I would earn back what I had lost in twelve days with Lulu, and this thought gave me a sort of melancholy glee, allowing me to relish like a saint counting his sores, how hard the work would be tomorrow.