His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the
world's affairs had come to him once when this pertinacity of misfortune
was at its climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life than
his own will. But the mysterious something could only be the devil,
and he was accordingly seized with an intense personal enmity to this
impertinent force. He had known what it was to have utterly exhausted
his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar, and to find himself
at nightfall in a strange city, without a penny to mitigate its
strangeness. It was under these circumstances that he made his entrance
into San Francisco, the scene, subsequently, of his happiest strokes of
fortune. If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, march along
the street munching a penny-loaf, it was only because he had not the
penny-loaf necessary to the performance. In his darkest days he had had
but one simple, practical impulse--the desire, as he would have phrased
it, to see the thing through. He did so at last, buffeted his way into
smooth waters, and made money largely. It must be admitted, rather
nakedly, that Christopher Newman's sole aim in life had been to
make money; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own
perception, simply to wrest a fortune, the bigger the better, from
defiant opportunity.
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