The neighbourhood was
low--just on the edge of the Barbary Coast, abounding in stores for
second-hand clothing, saloons, pawnshops, gun-stores, bird-stores, and
the shops of Chinese cobblers. Around the corner on Kearney Street was a
concert hall, a dive, to which the admission was free. Near by was the
old Plaza.
Underneath the hotel on the ground floor were two saloons, a barber
shop, and a broom manufactory. The lodgers themselves were for the most
part "transients," sailors lounging about shore between two voyages,
Swedes and Danes, farmhands, grape-pickers, and cow-punchers from
distant parts of the state, a few lost women, and Japanese cooks and
second-boys remaining there while they advertised for positions.
Vandover sank to the grade of these people at once with that fatal
adaptability to environment which he had permitted himself to foster
throughout his entire life, and which had led him to be contented in
almost any circumstances. It was as if the brute in him were forever
seeking a lower level, wallowing itself lower and lower into the filth
and into the mire, content to be foul, content to be prone, to be inert
and supine.
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