The full consequences of this moral surrender--shall we call it?--can only appear as we go on with our story. Meanwhile, we may note that, precisely because of his divided soul, Mark Twain could not consistently and deliberately pursue the main chance. Had he been able to do so he might, in a few years, have bought his liberty; but he lost interest in his journalistic enterprise just as he was to lose interest in so many other lucrative enterprises in the future. And every time he was driven back to make a fresh attempt. "I have a perfect _horror_ and heart-sickness over it," Mrs. Clemens wrote to her sister after the bankruptcy of the publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Co. "I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace. I suppose it always will mean that to me. Sue, if you were to see me you would see that I have grown old very fast during this last year: I have wrinkled. Most of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible." Naturally, inevitably; but imagine an author, who was also a devoted lover, having to respond to a stimulus like that! His bankruptcy was, to Mark Twain, like a sudden dawn of joyous freedom. "Farewell--a long farewell--to business!" he exclaimed during those weeks of what might have seemed an impending doom. "I will _never_ touch it again! I will live in literature, I will wallow in it, revel in it; I will swim in ink!" But when his release finally comes he writes as follows to his wife, whom he has left in France: "Now and then a good and dear Joe Twitchell or Susy Warner condoles with me and says, 'Cheer up--don't be downhearted' ... and none of them suspect what a burden has been lifted from me and how blithe I am inside. _Except_ when I think of you, dear heart--then I am not blithe; for I seem to see you grieving and ashamed, and dreading to look people in the face.... You only seem to see rout, retreat, and dishonored colors dragging in the dirt--whereas none of these things exist. There is temporary defeat, but no dishonor--and we will march again. Charley Warner said to-day, 'Sho, Livy isn't worrying. So long as she's got you and the children she doesn't care what happens. She knows it isn't her affair.' Which didn't convince _me_!" No, Mrs. Clemens, who was so far from being the votary of genius, was not quite the votary of love either; she was, before all, the unquestioning daughter of that "wealthy coal-dealer" of Elmira, who had "held about a quarter of a million in her own right"; her husband might lag and lapse as a literary man, but when he fell behind in the race of pecuniary emulation she could not help applying the spur. She had even invested her own patrimony in her husband's ventures, and all that the Paige Typesetting Machine had spared went up the chimney in the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Of course Mark Twain had to retrieve that! And so it went: as the years passed, owing to the very