praised it; from
time to time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for some
of Lapham's paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting its
former superiority. They were young fellows, and country persons, like
Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted
provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement
above the level of their window. He got on well with them. At last,
they said what they would do. They said it was nonsense to talk of
buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out,
they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing. But they
would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody else's, and if
he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they would go in with
him. He should run the works at Lapham and manage the business in
Boston, and they would run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the
business in New York. The two brothers with whom Lapham talked named
their figure, subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha
Falls, to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his answer, so
that Lapham could have it inside of three days. But they felt
perfectly sure that he would approve; and Lapham started back on the
eleven o'clock train with an elation that gradually left him as he drew
near Boston, where the difficulties of raising this sum were to be over
come. It seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him
pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure thing, and
that they were right in believing they could raise the same sum
elsewhere; it would take all OF it, he admitted, to make their paint
pay on the scale they had the right to expect. At their age, he would
not have done differently; but when he emerged, old, sore, and
sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he
wished with a pathetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his
age. A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion
that it would be hard to raise the money. But he thought ruefully of
that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the
market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of
the fire that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he
thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled
away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had pocketed
whether he won or lost; and h