CHAPTER 9I SEEK THE UNDERWORLD.
For sketching a situation, no one ever touched Shakespeare; and he has a line which certainly described my state of dignity during the next days. It’s in “Julius Cæsar”; Anthony has just been saying, in some well chosen words which escape me for the moment, how important and prominent a citizen Cæsar was before his last meeting with Brutus, whereas afterwards there was “none so poor to do him reverence.”
That’s the description which struck me. Lord knows, I was no Cæsar, not even in Chicago; so my fall was not so far, yet the reception at bottom was much the same.
Of course, if you call the incorrigible habits of house servants “reverence” I still had some from them; at least, they kept calling me “sir” and “Mr. Stephen” and somebody sneaked in when nobod
