Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had woken him and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous even hag. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in-bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning I am practically the only one. He dressed, and when he went downstairs from the top floor of the rooming house in which he lived, the only sounds he heard were the coarse sounds of sleep the only lights burning were lights that had been forgotten. Charlie ate some breakfast in an all-night lunch wagon and took an elevated train uptown. From Third Avenue, he walked over to Sutton Place. The neighbourhood was dark. House after house put into the shine of the streetlights a wall of black windows. Millions and millions were sleeping, and this general loss of consciousness generated an impression of abandonment, as if this were the fall of the city, the end of time. He opened the iron-and-glass doors of the apartment building where he had been working for six months as an elevator operator, and went through the elegant lobby to a locker room at the back. He put on a striped vest with brass buttons, a false ascot, a pair of pants with a light blue stripe on the seam, and a coat. The night elevator man was dozing on the little bench in the car. Charlie woke him. The night elevator man told him thickly that the day doorman had been taken sick and wouldn't be in that day. With the doorman sick, Charlie wouldn't have any relief for lunch, and a lot of people would expect him to whistle for cabs. Charlie had been on duty a few minutes when 14 rang-Mrs. Hewing, who, he happened to know, was kind of immoral. Mrs, Hewing hadn't been to bed yet, and she got into the elevator wearing a long dress under her fur coat. She was followed by her two funny looking dogs. He took her down and watched her go out into the dark and take her dogs to the curb. She was outside for only a few minutes. Then she came in and he took her up to 14 again. When she got off the elevator, she said, 'Merry Christmas, Charlie.' 'Well, it isn't much a holiday for me, Mrs. Hewing,' he said. 'I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn't that people around here ain't generous--I mean I got plenty of tips--but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don't have any family or anything, and Christmas isn't much of a holiday for me.' 'I'm sorry, Charlie,' Mrs. Hewing said. 'I don't have any family myself, It is kind of sad when you're alone, isn't it?' she called her dogs and followed them into her apartment. He went down. It was quiet then, and Charlie lit a cigarette. The heating plant in the basement encompassed the building at that hour in a regular and profound vibration, and the sullen noises of arriving steam heat began to resound, first in the lobby and then to reverberate up through all the sixteen stories, but this was a mechanical awakening, and it didn't lighten his loneliness or his petulance. The black air outside the glass doors had begun to turn blue, but the blue light seemed to have no source it appeared in the middle of the air. It was a tearful light, and he wanted to cry. Then a cab drove up, and the Walsers got out, drunk and dressed in evening clothes, and he took them up to their penthouse. The Walsers got him to brood about the difference between his life in a furnished room and the lives of the people overhead. It was terrible. All the following statements may account for the sadness felt by Charlie on Christmas EXCEPT______.