The effect of this satisfactory state of affairs on him was to develop in him a moroseness almost amounting to neurasthenia. Like many men of his generation, Lewis was at once practical and imbalanced, matter-of-fact and neurotic. He complained that success clung to him like a "bad patch" to a gambler. He always made a profit even from the riskiest ventures; it was about this time that the Steel and Smelting Company managed to keep four huge furnaces of two hundred and fifty tons capacity each alight at Gebel Hadid, in spite of the industrial crisis, and everyone knows in what an enormous profit that resulted. What irritated him most was the impression of success he gave everyone, when all his successes were far smaller than he expected. He had left the card room at the club the day before because he was bored with winning. "Financiers," he said, "are only clear-sighted in financial matters. It is a gift, a kink; in everything else they're idiots. The entire French nation goes in for nothing but finance. It's the last straw." Was Lewis in love with Irene? He had imagined himself so often to be in love, always either stopping himself or being stopped in due course, that he did not like to answer the question. He would have been afraid of driving himself into it. Lewis imagined that he lived in perfect harmony with himself in a kind of solitary egoism from which he never emerged save to satisfy his instincts, and he meant to go on living like that. It must not be forgotten that Lewis had no great strength of character. Very far from it. He always said that in love it is never dangerous to hit above the belt. He did not believe in too much self-examination. Neither pride nor personal integrity mattered to turn, as he always acted on impulse. His reflexes stood him in the stead of morals and education. This indifference did not now prevent him from feeling his heart sink occasionally beneath the load of some obscure weight, some feeling of uneasiness. Where did this chronic condition originate? In Sicily? His self-esteem had not been called into play at all. At no moment had he, as the Orientals say, "lost face." Quite the contrary. And yet, ever since those few words which he spoke to put an end to the conversation of that one evening, he had felt himself dominated, kept in check by an invisible will, by the emanations of a personality whose influence neither distance nor time could weaken. On the occasion of Pascal's centenary, Lewis had read in his diary some of the thoughts of that too little-known author. He remembered one: "The first effect of love is to inspire a profound respect." It had made him laugh, and then it had made him think. As a rule he only thought of Irene as of a business rival. Sometimes as a human being as well. But that any woman was not made to sacrifice herself (to him, of course) amazed him; that a woman could have any duties unconnected with love shocked him.