The autumn haze hung like a diaphanous veil over mountains and waterways. Vine maple and alder shone brick-red and pale gold in the low ground. Hawk's Nest lifted its flaming roof across the channel. He wondered if there were a week-end party there. He wondered how they would look at him, these sons and daughters of the well-to-do, if he came stalking up the porch steps in calked boots and Mackinaw shirt. Rod smiled. Even Phil considered him a little too thoroughgoing in his logging career. To the rest, to Grove's crowd, it would simply be a joke. They all believed in work--in getting it done, not in doing it--and most of them were a little tainted with the idea that labor, especially such labor as is hard and poorly paid, was the exclusive privilege of the laboring class. Rod, who had learned a great many astonishing things in two months among men who were not in the least dismayed by sweat and dust and noise, found himself for the moment viewing Grove, the fast crowd Grove traveled with, very much from the logger's point of view. "If you neither feed yourself, nor clothe yourself, nor direct the production of anything useful, nor create anything beautiful, what the hell justification have you for existing?" Andy Hall had once attacked the idea of a leisure class. He had outlined a theory of the leisure class very much in the manner of Veblen. Then he proceeded to attack it, first on moral grounds, then on the basis of its social utility. Rod found himself half in agreement just then. There was not and had never been in his mind any doubt of the courage, energy, and usefulness of the first Norquays. The original Roderick had reaped for himself and his followers the reward of enterprise initiated by himself. He had handed on his winnings. So far as Rod could see, there was no great virtue in merely standing pat and holding on,--resting on dead men's accomplishments. That was a bog he determined his feet should never sink into. Grove, for instance, was not standing pat. Yet curiously, he had always thought of Grove and the Norquay Trust as a dubious undertaking,--dubious in character and uncertain as to outcome. By all the conventional signs and tokens he was wrong. Grove was certainly moving with purposeful intent. He was a dynamo for energy. Already he was credited with stupendous achievements. But to Rod that seemed a great deal worse than the gentlemanly _laissez faire_ which his father had set as a standard. "Oh, damn, I wish it were spring again," Rod muttered as he strode down the hill.