co, and
nothing that he observed by the way contributed to mitigate his sense of
being a good fellow wronged.

He saw a great many other good fellows--his old friends--but he told
none of them of the trick that had been played him. He said simply that
the lady he was to have married had changed her mind, and when he
was asked if he had changed his own, he said, "Suppose we change the
subject." He told his friends that he had brought home no "new ideas"
from Europe, and his conduct probably struck them as an eloquent proof
of failing invention. He took no interest in chatting about his affairs
and manifested no desire to look over his accounts. He asked half a
dozen questions which, like those of an eminent physician inquiring
for particular symptoms, showed that he still knew what he was talking
about; but he made no comments and gave no directions. He not only
puzzled the gentlemen on the stock exchange, but he was himself
surprised at the extent of his indifference. As it seemed only to
increase, he made an effort to combat it; he tried to interest himself
and to take up his old occupations. But they appeared unreal to him; do
what he would he somehow could not believe in them. Sometimes he began
to fear that there was something the matter with his head; that his
brain, perhaps, had softened, and that the end of his strong activities
had come. This idea came back to him with an exasperating force.
A hopeless, helpless loafer, useful to no one and detestable to
himself--this was what the treachery of the Bellegardes had made of him.
In his restless idleness he came back from San Francisco to New York,
and sat for three days in the lobby of his hotel, looking out through
a huge wall of plate-glass at the unceasing stream of pretty girls in
Parisian-looking dresses, undulating past with little parcels nursed
against their neat figures. At the end of three days he returned to San
Francisco, and having arrived there he wished he had stayed away. He
had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he
should never find it again. He had nothing to do here, he sometimes said
to himself; but there was something beyond the ocean that he was
still to do; something that he had left undone experimentally and
speculatively, to see if it could content itself to remain undone. But
it was not content: it kept pulling at his heartstrings and thumping at
his reason; it murmured in his ears and hovered perpetually bef