The clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward Lewiston’s note the different sums coming in this month. There were large bills to be paid to the typometer’s credit by several firms, one of them Coneways’. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for the entire year—it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next, Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their principal after these intervening six months of the year were over. Well, let them! Lewiston’s note was what he had to think of now. All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not fail at once; they are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He must think harder to find a way of accomplishment, that was all. His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich’s, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its grewsome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care; there were moments of such strong repulsion that he felt as if he couldn’t turn down that street again—moments lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea—a foolish, womanish state which irritated him.