And yet, so weak is human resolution, such a rope of sand is it to fetter the resistless progress of character,--which is destiny,--that the next evening found West with the Sunday paper spread before him, carefully studying the financial article, and elaborating his plans for a grand _coup_, by which he should regain all the thousands he had lost. He had become very canny during the week's study of the market reports, and he felt this Sunday evening all the pleasant satisfaction of one who, out of sight, cunningly devises the overthrow of clever enemies. On Monday morning he would--in imagination, of course--go into the field with a shrewdly devised scheme of buying and selling, which should result in the triumphant re-establishment of his financial standing. When one is dealing with life in imagination merely there is of course no limit to the extent to which one may make himself master of events; and partly from a keen fancy, partly from pure _naïveté_, West's plan involved nothing less than bulling the market himself upon his visionary capital, now shrunken to some $70,000. All day Monday West was in a state of excitement which was amazingly absurd when one considers that the cause was wholly fancy. When a drunkard returns to his cups he is notoriously more intemperate than before, and in delivering himself up for a second time to the intoxication of his vagaries Barum plunged more recklessly than ever into its extravagances. On Tuesday he was once more to be rich, and then he would speculate no more. Safe mortgages and government bonds should suffice him as investments, even though the rate of interest they paid was low. He would not again expose himself to the chances of such feverish excitement as that in which he had spent the past week. So real had the whole business become to him that, while he smiled at his own folly as he took up the Tuesday evening paper, he actually felt a pang of disappointment to discover that his imaginary operations had produced no effect on the stock market. So far from rising, stocks had that day gone almost out of sight, so great had been the fall in the price of securities of all sorts. A feeling almost of despair came over the young man as he read. He had gone out into the street to buy the earliest edition which would contain the account of the sales that day, and as he walked toward his attic he experienced almost as sharp a pang as if the absolute wreck which he found had overtaken his imaginary fortune had befallen a genuine bank-account. That unreasonable youthful disappointment which arises from a sense of failure _per se_, with little reference to the real importance of the stake, stung him keenly; and he was one of those men who cannot but confound real and æsthetic grievances.