“This will never do,” he said to himself.  “This will never do.  I’m not sure whether I can stand much of this or not.”  Still he turned his face to the wall, and after several hours sleep eventually came.

Chapter LIV

Those who by any pleasing courtesy of fortune, accident of birth, inheritance, or the wisdom of parents or friends, have succeeded in avoiding making that anathema of the prosperous and comfortable, “a mess of their lives,” will scarcely understand the mood of Cowperwood, sitting rather gloomily in his cell these first days, wondering what, in spite of his great ingenuity, was to become of him.  The strongest have their hours of depression.  There are times when life to those endowed with the greatest intelligence—­perhaps mostly to those—­takes on a somber hue.  They see so many phases of its dreary subtleties.  It is only when the soul of man has been built up into some strange self-confidence, some curious faith in its own powers, based, no doubt, on the actual presence of these same powers subtly involved in the body, that it fronts life unflinchingly.  It would be too much to say that Cowperwood’s mind was of the first order.  It was subtle enough in all conscience—­and involved, as is common with the executively great, with a strong sense of personal advancement.  It was a powerful mind, turning, like a vast searchlight, a glittering ray into many a dark corner; but it was not sufficiently disinterested to search the ultimate dark.  He realized, in a way, what the great astronomers, sociologists, philosophers, chemists, physicists, and physiologists were meditating; but he could not be sure in his own mind that, whatever it was, it was important for him.  No doubt life held many strange secrets.  Perhaps it was essential that somebody should investigate them.  However that might be, the call of his own soul was in another direction.  His business was to make money—­to organize something which would make him much money, or, better yet, save the organization he had begun.

But this, as he now looked upon it, was almost impossible.  It had been too disarranged and complicated by unfortunate circumstances.  He might, as Steger pointed out to him, string out these bankruptcy proceedings for years, tiring out one creditor and another, but in the meantime the properties involved were being seriously damaged.  Interest charges on his unsatisfied loans were making heavy inroads; court costs were mounting up; and, to cap it all, he had discovered with Steger that there were a number of creditors—­those who had sold out to Butler, and incidentally to Mollenhauer—­who would never accept anything except the full value of their claims.  His one hope now was to save what he could by compromise a little later, and to build up some sort of profitable business through Stephen Wingate.  The latter was coming in a day or two, as soon as Steger had made some working arrangement for him with Warden Michael Desmas who came the second day to have a look at the new prisoner.