e could not think of any securities on
which he could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the mine
and works at Lapham. He set his teeth in helpless rage when he thought
of that property out on the G. L. & P., that ought to be worth so much,
and was worth so little if the Road chose to say so.

He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round, as he
would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise the money.
But he found that people of whom he hoped to get it were in the
conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to the wall. Somehow,
there seemed a sense of his embarrassments abroad. Nobody wanted to
lend money on the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the
state of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that
the state of the business would not bear looking into. He could raise
fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on
his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth a
million by rights could do! He said a million, and he said it in
defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an analysis
which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show at the time, for it
proved that he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed. His
hurt vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or advice; and
if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it
would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people,
but not capitalists on the scale he required.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to
bring men. When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to
all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and
he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had
befriended in their time of need. He said to himself that he had been
a fool for that; and he scorned himself for certain acts of
scrupulosity by which he had lost money in the past. Seeing the moral
forces all arrayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have
the chance offered him to get even with them again; he thought he
should know how to look out for himself. As he understood it, he had
several days to turn about in, and he did not let one day's failure
dishearten him. The morning after his return he had, in fact, a gleam
of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the moment. A man
came in to inquire about one of Rogers's wil