e picked men
increased to the dignity of a passion. The great psychological forces
of a successful career gathered and made head against the circumstances
which such careers always arouse in polarity.

Impossibilities were puffed aside like thistles. The men went at them
headlong. They gave way before the rush. Thorpe always led. Not for a
single instant of the day nor for many at night was he at rest. He was
like a man who has taken a deep breath to reach a definite goal, and who
cannot exhale until the burst of speed be over. Instinctively he seemed
to realize that a let-down would mean collapse.

After the camp had fallen asleep, he would often lie awake half of the
few hours of their night, every muscle tense, staring at the sky. His
mind saw definitely every detail of the situation as he had last viewed
it. In advance his imagination stooped and sweated to the work which his
body was to accomplish the next morning. Thus he did everything twice.
Then at last the tension would relax. He would fall into uneasy sleep.
But twice that did not follow. Through the dissolving iron mist of his
striving, a sharp thought cleaved like an arrow. It was that after
all he did not care. The religion of Success no longer held him as its
devoutest worshiper. He was throwing the fibers of his life into the
engine of toil, not because of moral duty, but because of moral pride.
He meant to succeed in order to prove to himself that he had not been
wrong.

The pain of the arrow-wound always aroused him from his doze with a
start. He grimly laughed the thought out of court. To his waking
moments his religion was sincere, was real. But deep down in his
sub-consciousness, below his recognition, the other influence was
growing like a weed. Perhaps the vision, not the waking, had been right.
Perhaps that far-off beautiful dream of a girl which Thorpe's idealism
had constructed from; the reactionary necessities of Thorpe's harsh life
had been more real than his forest temples of his ruthless god! Perhaps
there were greater things than to succeed, greater things than success.
Perhaps, after all, the Power that put us here demands more that we
cleave one to the other in loving-kindness than that we learn to blow
the penny whistles it has tossed us. And then the keen, poignant memory
of the dream girl stole into the young man's mind, and in agony was
immediately thrust forth. He would not think of her. He had given
her up. He had cast the die.