Why shouldn't he? It was simply assured. He had only to stand back with his hands in his pockets, aloof, unmoved, while Grove's white elephant died for lack of the nourishment he alone could supply. Hadn't his father done enough? The figures had staggered Rod at the time. Although every active productive undertaking of the estate had stopped for the duration of the war, yet their fortune had not shrunk appreciably. Not until Rod's father began to pour it into those looted coffers. Every liquid asset, bonds, gilt-edged securities, real estate,--all hypothecated to raise funds. Hopeless to think of ever redeeming them. But there was still timber which with labor and machinery he could transform into money. He owned that clear of all encumbrance, thousands of acres of it, the finest virgin timber on the Pacific coast. With Hawk's Nest and standing timber he still had firm grasp of the old, comfortable security for himself and all the collateral branches of the Norquay clan. Why should he voluntarily give that up? To organize his forces, to live under the pressure of a struggle for more and more revenue, to drive labor, to watch markets and prices with a feverish intensity, to live and breathe and think in terms of money and more money was hateful to him. To whip up a sick heart day after day. Suppose it laid down on him? Who would carry on? He looked back from his own doorstep at the square roof and the skeleton sign of the Norquay Trust looming on the jagged downtown skyline. It was like an inverted pyramid resting on his shoulders, crushing him. He walked through the living room with a glance. He knew Mary would be upstairs where she had arranged a workshop for herself with a desk, a shelf of books, a typewriter. She sat there making aimless marks on the margin of a pad on which she had written a few sentences. He had explained the situation to her roughly long ago. Now he sat down to explain in detail, to outline his personal relation to an inherited problem. "There it is," he concluded. "What do you think? I can go through with it, or I can let it go. It may beat me even if I do my best. At most we'll only have Hawk's Nest and some machinery. I can hardly hope to salvage more than that." She looked at him for a second with an enigmatical smile. "Why ask me, Rod?" she said finally. "You're going to do what one would naturally expect you to do. You've made up your mind. You don't really consider that you have much choice, do you?" "No," he admitted. "I can't see that I have. I hate the job. I don't like cutting my own throat. I don't like paying for a dead horse that somebody else killed. But I simply can't do the other thing."