Come, this wasn't work. He might as well have stayed out with the family and helped with the dishes. This was being like Eugenia Mills, who always somehow had something to do upstairs when there was any work to do downstairs. Eugenia was a woman who somehow managed to stand from under life, anyhow, had been the most successful draft-dodger he knew. No call had been urgent enough to get _her_ to the recruiting station to shoulder her share of what everybody had to do. But what did she get out of her successful shirking? She was in plain process of drying up and blowing away. He turned to his desk and drew out the papers which had the figures and estimates on that popple. He would see if the Warner woodlot had as much popple and basswood on it as they thought. It would, of course, be easiest to get it off that lot, if there were enough of it to fill the order for casters. The Hemmingway lot and the Dornwood lot oughtn't to be lumbered except in winter, with snow for the sleds. But you could haul straight downhill from the Warner lot, even on wheels, using the back lane in the Eagle Rocks woods. There was a period of close attention to his papers, when he heard nothing at all of what went on in the rooms next his study. His mind was working with the rapid, trained exactitude which was a delight to him, with a sure, firm grasp on the whole problem in all its complicated parts. Finally he nodded with satisfaction, pushed the papers away, and lighted his pipe, contentedly. He had it by the tail. He leaned back in his chair, drawing on the newly lighted pipe and ruminating again. He thought to himself that he would like to see any other man in the valley who could make an estimate like that, and be sure of it, who would know what facts to gather and where to get them, on the cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where, and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks. It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They weren't and that was all there was to be said about it. Any one of them, any single one of his employees, put in his place as manager, would run the business into a hole as deep as hell inside six months. And if you put the whole lot of them at it, it would only be six weeks instead of six months before the bust-up.