Failure

There was nothing for it but the blunt truth so Bruce wrote: Sprudell boasted that he would down me and he has. Villainy, incompetency and carelessness have been too strong a combination for my inexperience to beat.

I've failed. I'm broke. I've spent $40,000 and have nothing to show for it but a burned-out plant of an obsolete type.

You can't imagine how it hurts to write these words. The disappointment and humiliation of it passes belief. No one who has not been through an experience like it could ever, even faintly, understand.

I grow hot and cold with shame when I look back now and see my mistakes. They are so plain that it makes me feel a fool--an ignorant, conceited, inexperienced fool. I've learned many lessons, but at what a price!

You'll see from the enclosed paper what I was up against. But it does not excuse me, not in the least. Thinking myself just, I was merely weak. A confiding confidence in one's fellowman is very beautiful in theory but there's nothing makes him more ridiculous when it's taken advantage of. When I recall the suspicious happenings that should have warned me from Jenning's incompetency to Smaltz's villainy I have no words in which to express my mortification. The stockholders cannot condemn me more severely for my failure than I condemn myself.

You are the beginning and end of everything with me. All my hopes, my ambitions, my life itself have come to centre in you. It was the thought that it was for you that kept me going when I have been so tired doing two men's work that I could scarcely drag one foot after the other. It made me take risks I might otherwise never have dared to take. It kept me plodding on when one failure after another smashed me in the face so fast that I could not see for the blackness.