That forthcoming contest with Corkey!

Is it not uncomfortable?  What is it Corkey is saying?  Oh! yes, Corkey, to be sure!  “Mr. Corkey, I should have told you they will do nothing.  You must contest.”

Here, therefore, are two men who are plunged into the deepest seethings of mental action.  The one has missed greatness by the distance of a mere hand’s grasp; the other is half crazed to find himself so fatally conspicuous in society.

Let the rich, respectable, beloved, ambitious and eloquent Lockwin hurry back to that problem:  What to do when he shall arrive in Chicago?

Can the community be deceived?  Let us see how it fared with Lockwin’s friend Orthwaite, who found life to be insupportable.  The respectability which so beclogs Lockwin had been secretly lost by Orthwaite.

His shame would soon be exposed.  Orthwaite returned to his home on the last suburban train.  He purposely appeared gay before his train-acquaintances.  He left the train in high spirits.  He pursued a lonely path toward home.  He reached a stream.  He set to work making many marks of a desperate struggle.  He placed a revolver at his heart and fired.  Then with unusual fortitude he threw the weapon in the stream.

But the ruse was ineffectual.  The keen eyes of the detectives and the keener ear of scandal had the whole truth in a week’s time.  It was suicide, said the press—­bald, cowardly, pitiful.

How difficult!  How difficult!  Now let us set at that device of mysterious disappearance.  How far is that fair to a young wife?  Why should she wait and search and hope, although Esther would not disturb herself much!  She is too cold for that.

How difficult!  How difficult!  But why do the eyes of Corkey bulge with excitement?  Oh, yes, the ship is foundering because Corkey is in the way of this great business.  Corkey should be flung in the sea and well rid of him.  As the ship is foundering we will go on deck, but when a man is so conspicuous as David Lockwin, how can he commit suicide—­how can he disappear?

There are words, indistinctly heard.  It is Corkey crying to Lockwin to climb up the steps to the hurricane deck.  Indeed it is a clever riddance of that uncomfortable man.  Ouf! that brutal sneeze, that jargon, that tobacco, that quaking of head and hesitancy of expression!  It distracts one’s thoughts from an insoluble problem; How to shuffle off this coil—­not of life, but of respectability, conspicuity, environment!

But what is this?  This is not a wave.  If David Lockwin hold longer to this stanchion, he will go to the bottom of the sea.  This must be what excited Corkey.  Something has happened.

The red fire of drowning sets up its conflagration.

Lockwin has time for one regret.  His estate has lost $75,000.  He enters the holocaust and passes into nothingness, feeling heavy blows.