Out of the whole list there were only two situations for which he could even inquire, and he soon found that for each of these there were hundreds of applicants. At first his natural hopefulness reasserted itself, and each morning he would set out briskly, resolving to leave no stone unturned, but when days and weeks had passed by in the monotonous search, his heart began to fail him; he used to start from the little back street in Vauxhall doggedly, dull despair eating at his heart, and a sickening, ever-present consciousness that he was only an insignificant unit struggling to find standing room in a world where selfishness and money-grubbing reigned supreme. Each week brought him of course letters from Norway, his uncle sent him letters of introduction to various London firms, but each letter brought him only fresh disappointment. As the consul had told him, the market was already overcrowded, and though very possibly he might have met with work in the previous summer when all was well with him, no one seemed inclined to befriend this son of a bankrupt, with his bitter tone and proud bearing; the impression he gave every one was that he was an Ishmaelite with his hand against every man, and it certainly did seem that at present every man’s hand was against him. People write so much about the dangers of success and prosperity, and the hardening effects of wealth, that they sometimes forget the other side of the picture. Failure is always supposed to make a man patient and humble and good; it rarely does so, unless to begin with his spirit has been wakened from sleep. The man whose faith has been a mere conventionality, or the man who like Frithiof has professed to believe in life, becomes inevitably bitter and hard when all things are against him. It is just then when a man is hard and bitter, just then when everything else has failed him, that the devil comes to the fore offering pleasures which in happier times would have had no attraction. At first certain aspects of London life had startled Frithiof; but he speedily became accustomed to them; if he thought of them at all it was with indifference rather than disgust. One day however, he passed with seeming abruptness into a new state of mind. Sick with disappointment after the failure of a rather promising scheme suggested to him by one of the men to whom his uncle had written, he walked through the crowded streets too hopeless and wretched even to notice the direction he had taken, and with a miserable perception that his last good card was played, and that all hope of success was over. His future was an absolute blank, his present a keen distress, his past too bright in contrast to bear thinking of.