inexperience.

Day after day he plodded, his dark face set in grim lines of purpose,
following up clews leading to possible investors which he obtained here
and there, and always with the one result. What credentials had he? To
what past successes could he point? None? Ah, good-day.

One morning Bruce opened his eyes and the conviction that he had failed
leaped into his mind as though it had been waiting like a cat at a mouse
hole to pounce upon him the instant of his return to consciousness.

"You have failed! You have got to give up! You are done!" The words
pounding into his brain affected him like hammer blows over the heart.
He laid motionless, inert, his face grown sallow upon the pillow, and he
thought that the feelings of a condemned man listening to the building
of his gallows must be something like his own.

Those who have struggled for something, tried with all their heart and
soul, fought to the last atom of their strength, and failed, know
something of the sickening heaviness, the dull, aching depression which
takes the vitality and seems actually to slow up the beating of the
heart.

Out in the world, he told himself, where men won things by their brains,
he had failed like any pitiable weakling; that he had been handicapped
by unpreparedness was no palliation of the crime of failure. Ignorance
was no excuse. In humiliation and chagrin he attributed the mistakes of
inexperience to lack of intelligence. His mother had over-estimated him,
he had over-estimated himself. It was presumption to have supposed he
was fitted for anything but manual labor. Sprudell had been right, he
thought bitterly, when he had sneered that muscle was his only asset.

He could see himself loading his belongings into Slim's old boat, his
blankets and the tattered soogan and bobbing through the rapids with the
blackened coffee-pot, the frying pan, and lard cans jingling in the
bottom, while Sprudell, with his hateful, womanish smile, watched his
ignominious departure. Bruce drew his sleeve across his damp forehead.
If there was any one thing which could goad him to further action it was
this picture.

He arose and dressed slowly. Bruce had known fatigue, the weakness of
hunger, but never anything like the leaden, heavy-footed depression
which comes from intense despondency and hopelessness.

As his finances had gone down he had gone up, until he was now located
permanently on the top floor of the hotel where the hall carpet