with man’s fortune.  If its process of accretion is never halted, if the balancing stage is never reached, there will be no toppling.  Rich men are, frequently, in these days, saved from this dissolution of their fortune by their ability to hire younger brains.  These younger brains look upon the interests of the fortune as their own, and so steady and direct its progress.  If each individual were left absolutely to the care of his own interests, and were given time enough in which to grow exceedingly old, his fortune would pass as his strength and will.  He and his would be utterly dissolved and scattered unto the four winds of the heavens.

But now see wherein the parallel changes.  A fortune, like a man, is an organism which draws to itself other minds and other strength than that inherent in the founder.  Beside the young minds drawn to it by salaries, it becomes allied with young forces, which make for its existence even when the strength and wisdom of the founder are fading.  It may be conserved by the growth of a community or of a state.  It may be involved in providing something for which there is a growing demand.  This removes it at once beyond the special care of the founder.  It needs not so much foresight now as direction.  The man wanes, the need continues or grows, and the fortune, fallen into whose hands it may, continues.  Hence, some men never recognise the turning in the tide of their abilities.  It is only in chance cases, where a fortune or a state of success is wrested from them, that the lack of ability to do as they did formerly becomes apparent.  Hurstwood, set down under new conditions, was in a position to see that he was no longer young.  If he did not, it was due wholly to the fact that his state was so well balanced that an absolute change for the worse did not show.

Not trained to reason or introspect himself, he could not analyze the change that was taking place in his mind, and hence his body, but he felt the depression of it.  Constant comparison between his old state and his new showed a balance for the worse, which produced a constant state of gloom or, at least, depression.  Now, it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates.  The poisons generated by remorse inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration.  To these Hurstwood was subject.

In the course of time it told upon his temper.  His eye no longer possessed that buoyant, searching shrewdness which had characterized it in Adams Street.  His step was not as sharp and firm.  He was given to thinking, thinking, thinking.  The new friends he made were not celebrities.  They were of a cheaper, a slightly more sensual and cruder, grade.  He could not possibly take the pleasure in this company that he had in that of those fine frequenters of the Chicago resort.  He was left to brood.