"What has happened?" he asked himself a hundred times during the headlong drive. A corner in Pittsburgh & New Orleans--that was possible but hardly probable. But if a corner had taken place it meant ruin, absolute ruin--and worse. The thought was too appalling to be seized at once. He reassured himself with specious explanations. There might be a flurry; Gunther and his crowd, who were in control of the system, might have attempted a division to support their property; but the final attack at which Joseph Skelly had hinted more than once as timed for the coming week, the throwing on the market of 100,000 shares--200,000 if necessary--must overwhelm this support, must overwhelm it. What was terrible, though, was the unknown--to be hours from New York, cut off from communication, and not to know what was this shapeless dread. When they swung into Jenkinstown, orange lights from the windows cut up the snowbound streets in checkerboard patterns of light and shade: an organ was beginning in mournful bass from a shanty church; a cheap phonograph in a flickering ice-cream parlor was grinding out a ragged march. Through the windows, heavy parties still at the Sunday newspapers were gathered under swinging lamps. The cutter drew up by the hovel of a station and departed, leaving him alone in the semi-darkness, a prey to his thoughts. A group returning after a day's visit trudged past him, laughing uproariously, Slavic and brutish in type, the women in imitated finery, gazing at him in insolent curiosity. He began to walk to escape the dismal sense of unlovely existence they brought him. Beyond were the mathematical rows of barracks--other brutish lives, the bleak ice-cream parlor, the melancholy of the evening service. It was all so one-sided, obsessed by the one idea of labor, lacking in the simplest direction toward any comprehension of the enjoyment of life. The crisis he had reached, the threatened descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, brought with it that contrition which in men is a superstitious seeking for the secret of their own failures in some transgressed moral law. His own life all at once seemed cruelly selfish and gluttonous before this bleak view of the groping world and, profoundly stirred to self-analysis, he said to himself: "After all--why am I here--to try and change all this a little for the better or to pass on and out without significance?" And at the thought that year in and year out these hundreds would go on, doomed to this stagnation, there woke in him a horror, a horror of what it must mean to fall back and slip beneath the surface of society. He arrived in New York at three in the morning, after an interminable ride in the jolting, wheezing train, fervently awake in the dim and draughty smoking-car where strange human beings huddled over a greasy pack of cards or slept in drunken slumber. And all during the lagging return one thought kept beating against his brain: