ent on and Mother's condition continued unchanged.
She needed me and I could not leave her. I fished and, shot and sailed
and loafed, losing ambition and self-respect, aware that the majority of
the village people considered me too lazy to earn a living, and
caring little for their opinion. At first I had kept up a hit or miss
correspondence with one or two of my associates in the bank, but after
a while I dropped even this connection with the world. I was ashamed
to have my former acquaintances know what I had become, and they,
apparently, were quite willing to forget me. I expected to live and die
in Denboro, and I faced the prospect with indifference.

The summer people, cottagers and boarders, I avoided altogether and my
only friend, and I did not consider him that, was George Taylor, the
Denboro bank cashier. He was fond of salt-water and out-door sports and
we, occasionally enjoyed them together.

Thanks to the lawyer, our names had been scarcely mentioned in the
papers at the time of my father's death. No one in the village knew our
identity or our story. And, because I knew that Mother would worry if
she were told, I kept from her the fact that our little income was but
half of what it had been. Our wants were few, and if my clothes were no
longer made by the best tailors, if they were ready-made and out-of-date
and lacked pressing, they were whole, at all events, because Dorinda was
a tip-top mender. In fact, I had forgotten they were out-of-date until
the sight of the immaculately garbed young chap in the automobile
brought the comparison between us to my mind.

But now, as I sat on the wash-bench, thinking of all this, I looked down
at my baggy trousers and faded waistcoat with disgust. One of the surest
signs of the loss of self-respect is a disregard of one's personal
appearance. I looked like a hayseed--not the independent countryman who
wears old clothes on week days from choice and is proudly conscious of
a Sunday suit in the closet--but that other variety, the post-office and
billiard-room idler who has reached the point of utter indifference, is
too shiftless to care. Captain Jed was not so far wrong, after all--Lute
Rogers and I were birds of a feather in more ways than one.

No wonder that girl in the auto had looked at me as if I were something
too contemptible for notice. Yet I hated her for that look. I had
behaved like a boor, of course. Because I was a failure, a country
loafer with no prospe