What a half-year he had had! What a wonderful time he and Nell had put in together in this period of waiting and preparation. No matter how fine the realization might be, he was old enough to know that nothing could ever be for them like this period of creative planning when, moving around his problem, he had studied it, concentrated on it and felt that he had the solution in his own brain and personality. It fitted him! It was his work! It was like something in a book, like a missionary going out into the field, like a prophet looking beyond the veil of the present. Yes, that was what it was--he looked through to the future, right past what was there, the little halting one-horse affair, with its meager force of employees, so many of them superannuated, others of good stuff, but in the wrong places, all of them untrained and uninformed, dull, listless, bored, without a notion of what a fascinating job they had. He had looked through them and had seen the store he meant to have by the time he was forty-five; for he knew enough to look far ahead, to take his time, to build slowly and surely. There it stood, almost as plain to his eye as the poor thing that now took its place. He saw a big, shining-windowed building, the best in all that part of the state, with eighty or a hundred employees, trained, alert, on their toes, sure of their jobs, earning big money, developing themselves, full of personality and zip, as people can be only when they are in work they’re meant for and have been trained for. It would never be what a man from the city would call a _big_ business. He never wanted it so big that he couldn’t keep his hand on it all. It would be _his_ business, rather than a big one. But at that, he saw now, especially with Nell getting a salary for doing the advertising, it would bring them in more income than anybody else in town dreamed of having. They could live as they pleased as far as spending went. Not that that was the important part,--but still a very agreeable one. He was sure of all this, sure! By God, he couldn’t fail! The cards were stacked for him. A prosperous town, just the right size; good-will and a monopoly of trade that ran back for forty years; no big city within fifty miles--why, even the trains providentially ran at hours that were inconvenient for people who wished to go to the city to shop. And no rivals worth mentioning; nobody he couldn’t put out of business inside ten years. He thought again, as he had so many times, how miraculous it was that in the ten years since Uncle Charley had lost his grip, no Jew merchant had cut in to snatch the rich heart out of the situation. Nobody could do that now. He had the jump on the world.