He imagined the letter—a Christmas letter of eloquent good-feeling and a manly offer to let bygones be and begin the future afresh. Remembering his Dickens, he had faith in the influence of the season of peace and goodwill to aid him in his miracle of regeneration.
He made his attempt on one of those unseasonable wet nights that make Christmas week in New York a time of drizzling misery and bedraggledness. Down among the tenements the streets were brimful of muddy slush; the trestles of the elevated railroad dripped a fluid grime; the street lights struggled against the fog with the feebleness of guttered candles; the damp air freshened the evil odours of the quarter to a pungency that seemed to Don to reach his palate. He shivered, with his collar to his ears, hugging his bundle of Christmas papers under his arm, trying to convince himself that all this doubled ugliness of wet filth and poverty would aid him in his attack on Conroy. But he no longer tried to convince Pittsey, who was tired by his long day's work on scattered "assignments" and inclined to be sarcastic in his replies to Don's optimism. They went in silence, slipping on the uneven flagstones on which the fog had congealed in a film of ice. When they came to the many-windowed block of the Mills Hotel, as square and formal as a prison of cells, Pittsey said: "You wait outside for me here until I see him. He'll quarrel with me for bringing you if I take you in."
Don waited. After the first few minutes, he was encouraged to think that at least Bert had found Conroy where they had planned to find him—probably smoking and playing solitaire at one of the little tables
