backward swing had not yet ended. Still "enterprise," which was over
in the other quarter wore to his mind a different aspect at different
hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came trooping back
into his memory. Some of them he looked complacently enough in the face;
from some he averted his head. They were old efforts, old exploits,
antiquated examples of "smartness" and sharpness. Some of them, as he
looked at them, he felt decidedly proud of; he admired himself as if
he had been looking at another man. And, in fact, many of the qualities
that make a great deed were there: the decision, the resolution, the
courage, the celerity, the clear eye, and the strong hand. Of certain
other achievements it would be going too far to say that he was ashamed
of them for Newman had never had a stomach for dirty work. He was
blessed with a natural impulse to disfigure with a direct, unreasoning
blow the comely visage of temptation. And certainly, in no man could a
want of integrity have been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from
the straight at a glance, and the former had cost him, first and last,
a great many moments of lively disgust. But none the less some of his
memories seemed to wear at present a rather graceless and sordid mien,
and it struck him that if he had never done anything very ugly, he had
never, on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful. He had
spent his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands,
and, now that he stood well outside of it, the business of money-getting
appeared tolerably dry and sterile. It is very well to sneer at
money-getting after you have filled your pockets, and Newman, it may be
said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately. To
this it may be answered that he might have made another fortune, if he
chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing. It had
come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was
a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by
sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.