Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/57

 found himself in fine working opposition to this rival concern. He had known what it was to have utterly exhausted his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar and to find himself at nightfall in a strange city, without a penny to mitigate its strangeness. It was under these circumstances that he had made his entrance into San Francisco, the scene subsequently of his most victorious engagements. If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, march along the street munching a penny loaf it was only because he had not the penny loaf necessary to the performance. In his darkest days he had had but one simple, practical impulse—the desire, as he would have phrased it, to conclude the affair. He had ended by concluding many, had at last buffeted his way into smooth waters, had begun and continued to add dollars to dollars. It must be rather nakedly owned that Newman's only proposal had been to effect that addition; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own conception, simply to gouge a fortune, the bigger the better, out of its hard material. This idea completely filled his horizon and contented his imagination. Upon the uses of money, upon what one might do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting the golden stream, he had up to the eve of his fortieth year very scantly reflected. Life had been for him an open game, and he had played for high stakes. He had finally won and had carried off his winnings; and now what was he to do with them? He was a man to whom, sooner or later, the question was sure to present itself, and the answer to it belongs to our story. A vague sense that more answers were 27