e of
anything, good or bad. That's what I make out of it. I could have sworn.
Well, do you think I--particular as I am--would have touched those Union
Pacifics with trust money at all, if I hadn't thought it a thoroughly
good thing--good without spot or blemish?... And it was bad!

"It's a lesson to me. You start in to get a hundred percent. and you
come out with that. It means, in a way, a reproof for Pride. I've
thought of that, George--in the Night Watches. I was thinking this
morning when I was shaving, that that's where the good of it all comes
in. At the bottom I'm a mystic in these affairs. You calculate you're
going to do this or that, but at bottom who knows at all WHAT he's
doing? When you most think you're doing things, they're being done right
over your head. YOU'RE being done--in a sense. Take a hundred-to one
chance, or one to a hundred--what does it matter? You're being Led."

It's odd that I heard this at the time with unutterable contempt, and
now that I recall it--well, I ask myself, what have I got better?

"I wish," said I, becoming for a moment outrageous, "YOU were being Led
to give me some account of my money, uncle."

"Not without a bit of paper to figure on, George, I can't. But you trust
me about that never fear. You trust me."

And in the end I had to.

I think the bankruptcy hit my aunt pretty hard. There was, so far as I
can remember now, a complete cessation of all those cheerful outbreaks
of elasticity, no more skylarking in the shop nor scampering about the
house. But there was no fuss that I saw, and only little signs in her
complexion of the fits of weeping that must have taken her. She didn't
cry at the end, though to me her face with its strain of self-possession
was more pathetic than any weeping. "Well" she said to me as she came
through the shop to the cab, "Here's old orf, George! Orf to Mome number
two! Good-bye!" And she took me in her arms and kissed me and pressed me
to her. Then she dived straight for the cab before I could answer her.

My uncle followed, and he seemed to me a trifle too valiant and
confident in his bearing for reality. He was unusually white in the
face. He spoke to his successor at the counter. "Here we go!" he said.
"One down, the other up. You'll find it a quiet little business so long
as you run it on quiet lines--a nice quiet little business. There's
nothing more? No? Well, if you want to know anything write to me. I'll
always explain fully. Anyt