wrote:

Sprudell boasted that he would down me and he has. Villainy,
incompetency and carelessness have been too strong a combination
for my inexperience to beat.

I've failed. I'm broke. I've spent $40,000 and have nothing to
show for it but a burned-out plant of an obsolete type.

You can't imagine how it hurts to write these words. The
disappointment and humiliation of it passes belief. No one who
has not been through an experience like it could ever, even
faintly, understand.

I grow hot and cold with shame when I look back now and see my
mistakes. They are so plain that it makes me feel a fool--an
ignorant, conceited, inexperienced fool. I've learned many
lessons, but at what a price!

You'll see from the enclosed paper what I was up against. But it
does not excuse me, not in the least. Thinking myself just, I
was merely weak. A confiding confidence in one's fellowman is
very beautiful in theory but there's nothing makes him more
ridiculous when it's taken advantage of. When I recall the
suspicious happenings that should have warned me from Jenning's
incompetency to Smaltz's villainy I have no words in which to
express my mortification. The stockholders cannot condemn me
more severely for my failure than I condemn myself.

You are the beginning and end of everything with me. All my
hopes, my ambitions, my life itself have come to centre in you.
It was the thought that it was for you that kept me going when I
have been so tired doing two men's work that I could scarcely
drag one foot after the other. It made me take risks I might
otherwise never have dared to take. It kept me plodding on when
one failure after another smashed me in the face so fast that I
could not see for the blackness.

I never dreamed that love was like this--that it was such a
spur--such an incentive--or that it could add so to the
bitterness of failure. For I do love you, Helen; I see now that
I have loved you from the time I saw you with Sprudell--further
back than that, from the time I shook your picture out of that
old envelope.

I'm telling you this so you'll know why my tongue ran away with
my judgment when I talked so much to you of my plans and
expectations, hoping that in spite of the great disappointment
my failure will be to you, it will make you a little more