ng the
double edge of scorn no less keenly because only implied. Why wasn't
he doing a man's work? Why was he humbly taking his turn in a servile
and remote succession, where death's was the only hand that moved the
pawns? Why had he come back to it? He dared not confess the reason.
The best he could do was admit to himself he had been mistaken. The
rose tints had vanished from his sky and the path he had chosen was
disclosed in all its drab ugliness. He had chosen it fatuously. The
rose tints had been of his own making. He viciously snapped his mind
shut on the thought. For a while he would feverishly clamp his
attention to his work, while outside the sky continued serenely blue,
and the breeze that drifted through his window was languorous and
soft. But the work was too light. There was not enough of it, nor was
it of the nature that demanded his absorbed concentration. He thought
of Mr. Mosby, the unwitting cause of it all. And yet he did not blame
Uncle Buzz in the least. Rather he sided with him. They were both
inferior animals--not to be mentioned in the same breath with
progress, thrift, success.

Uncle Buzz had his troubles, too. He was bookkeeper of the general
store in Bloomfield, but he had never got to the point where he was
absolutely sure of his trial balances. Nor had Aunt Loraine ever got
to the point where she was absolutely sure of him, and he had had only
the slightest hand in the management of what was left of the farm. The
farm was Aunt Loraine's. But she always took what was necessary from
what Uncle Buzz got from the store to make both ends meet on the farm,
and that was, of late, becoming an ever-increasing distance. Uncle
Buzz felt a proprietor's interest. He liked to speak about it as "his
farm." Uncle Buzz would have loved to raise horses, thoroughbreds and
saddlers, but for obvious reasons that had been impossible. But he
went his jaunty way, waxing his moustaches, squandering his money on
fancy neckties, taking his surreptitious nip with all the gay bravado
of thirty years before, and getting seedier and seedier. He was a
dandelion withering on the stalk. He had long since given up hope of
being anything else but bookkeeper in the "Golden Rule," and indeed it
was only the stock which he held in that institution that insured him
the place such as it was. For Uncle Buzz was with age becoming more
unreliable. His mind would play queer tricks on him. The figures would
occasionally assume a demo