little to find himself in the same
boat with so many others; he smiled grimly, and said in his turn, yes,
he guessed that was about the size of it with a good many people. But
he had not the heart to tell his wife what he had done, and he sat
taciturn that whole evening, without even going over his accounts, and
went early to bed, where he lay tossing half the night before he fell
asleep. He slept at last only upon the promise he made himself that he
would withdraw the house from the broker's hands; but he went heavily
to his own business in the morning without doing so. There was no such
rush, anyhow, he reflected bitterly; there would be time to do that a
month later, probably.

It struck him with a sort of dismay when a boy came with a note from a
broker, saying that a party who had been over the house in the fall had
come to him to know whether it could be bought, and was willing to pay
the cost of the house up to the time he had seen it. Lapham took
refuge in trying to think who the party could be; he concluded that it
must have been somebody who had gone over it with the architect, and he
did not like that; but he was aware that this was not an answer to the
broker, and he wrote that he would give him an answer in the morning.

Now that it had come to the point, it did not seem to him that he could
part with the house. So much of his hope for himself and his children
had gone into it that the thought of selling it made him tremulous and
sick. He could not keep about his work steadily, and with his nerves
shaken by want of sleep, and the shock of this sudden and unexpected
question, he left his office early, and went over to look at the house
and try to bring himself to some conclusion here. The long procession
of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of the
sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat,
stopped in front of his house and looked at their multitude. They were
not merely a part of the landscape; they were a part of his pride and
glory, his success, his triumphant life's work which was fading into
failure in his helpless hands. He ground his teeth to keep down that
lump, but the moisture in his eyes blurred the lamps, and the keen pale
crimson against which it made them flicker. He turned and looked up,
as he had so often done, at the window-spaces, neatly glazed for the
winter with white linen, and recalled the night when he had stopped
with Ire