He was confused and walked out of the station into the street. "What a
silly fellow I have become, playing with colored stones like a child," he
thought, but at the same time put the stones carefully into his pockets.

Ever since that night when he had been attacked in the motor, the sense of
some indefinable, inner struggle had been going on in Hugh, as it went on
that day in the station at Pittsburgh and on the night in the shop, when he
found himself unable to fix his attention on the prints of the Iowa man's
machine. Unconsciously and quite without intent he had come into a new
level of thought and action. He had been an unconscious worker, a doer
and was now becoming something else. The time of the comparatively simple
struggle with definite things, with iron and steel, had passed. He fought
to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life
about him. The poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river, who
had forced himself in advance of his fellows along the road of mechanical
development, was still in advance of his fellows of the growing Ohio towns.
The struggle he was making was the struggle his fellows of another
generation would one and all have to make.

Hugh got into his home-bound train at four o'clock and went into the
smoking car. The somewhat distorted and twisted fragment of thoughts that
had all day been playing through his mind stayed with him. "What difference
does it make if the new parts I have ordered for the machine have to be
thrown away?" he thought. "If I never complete the machine, it's all right.
The one the Iowa man had made does the work."

For a long time he struggled with that thought. Tom, Steve, all the Bidwell
men with whom he had been associated, had a philosophy into which the
thought did not fit. "When you put your hand to the plow do not turn back,"
they said. Their language was full of such sayings. To attempt to do a