"Quit!" cried Jock McChesney. "Quit! Not on your white s.p.a.ce!"

"Good!" said Bartholomew Berg, and took Jock McChesney's hand in his own great friendly grasp.

An instinct as strong as that which had made him blatant in his hour of triumph now caused him to avoid, in his hour of defeat, the women-folk before whom he would fain be a hero. He avoided Grace Galt all that long, dreary afternoon. He thought wildly of staying down-town for the evening, of putting off the meeting with his mother, of avoiding the dreaded explanations, excuses, confessions.

But when he let himself into the flat at five-thirty the place was very quiet, except for Annie, humming in a sort of nasal singsong of content in the kitchen.

He flicked on the light in the living-room. A new magazine had come. It lay on the table, its bright cover staring up invitingly.

He ran through its pages. By force of habit he turned to the back pages. Ads started back at him--clothing ads, paint ads, motor ads, ads of portable houses, and vacuum cleaners--and toilette preparations. He shut the magazine with a vicious slap.

He flicked off the light again, for no reason except that he seemed to like the dusk. In his own bedroom it was very quiet.

He turned on the light there, too, then turned it off. He sat down at the edge of his bed. How was it in the stories? Oh, yes! The cub always started out on an impossibly difficult business stunt and came back triumphant, to be made a member of the firm at once.

A vision of his own roseate hopes and dreams rose up before him.

It grew very dark in the little room, then altogether dark. Then an impudent square of yellow from a light turned on in the apartment next door flung itself on the bedroom floor. Jock stared at it moodily.

A key turned in the lock. A door opened and shut. A quick step.

Then: "Jock!" A light flashed in the living-room.

Jock sat up suddenly. He opened his mouth to answer. There issued from his throat a strange and absurd little croak.

"Jock! Home?"

"Yes," answered Jock, and straightened up. But before he could flick on his own light his mother stood in the doorway, a tall, straight, buoyant figure.

"I got your wire and--Why, dear! In the dark! What--"

"Must have fallen asleep, I guess," muttered Jock. Somehow he dreaded to turn on the lights.

And then, very quietly, Emma McChesney came in. She found him, there in the dark, as surely as a mother bear finds her cubs in a cave. She sat down beside him at the edge of the bed and put her hand on his shoulder, and brought his head down gently to her breast. And at that the room, which had been a man's room with its pipe, its tobacco jar, its tie rack filled with cravats of fascinating shapes and hues, became all at once a boy's room again, and the man sitting there with straight, strong shoulders and his little air of worldliness became in some miraculous way a little boy again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "... became in some miraculous way a little boy again"]

III

DICTATED BUT NOT READ

About the time that Jock McChesney began to carry a yellow walking-stick down to work each morning his mother noticed a growing tendency on his part to patronize her. Now Mrs. Emma McChesney, successful, capable business woman that she was, could afford to regard her young son's att.i.tude with a quiet and deep amus.e.m.e.nt. In twelve years Emma McChesney had risen from the humble position of stenographer in the office of the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company to the secretaryship of the firm. So when her young son, backed by the profound business knowledge gained in his one year with the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company, hinted gently that her methods and training were archaic, ineffectual, and lacking in those twin condiments known to the twentieth century as pep and ginger, she would listen, eyebrows raised, lower lip caught between her teeth--a trick which gives a distorted expression to the features, calculated to hide any lurking tendency to grin. Besides, though Emma McChesney was forty she looked thirty-two (as business women do), and knew it. Her hard-working life had brought her in contact with people, and things, and events, and had kept her young.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Jock McChesney began to carry a yellow walking-stick down to work"]

"Thank fortune!" Mrs. McChesney often said, "that I wasn't cursed with a life of ease. These ma.s.sage-at-ten-fitting-at-eleven-bridge-at-one women always look such hags at thirty-five."

But repet.i.tion will ruin the rarest of jokes. As the weeks went on and Jock's att.i.tude persisted, the twinkle in Emma McChesney's eye died. The glow of growing resentment began to burn in its place.

Now and then there crept into her eyes a little look of doubt and bewilderment. You sometimes see that same little shocked, dazed expression in the eyes of a woman whose husband has just said, "Isn't that hat too young for you?"

Then, one evening, Emma McChesney's resentment flared into open revolt. She had announced that she intended to rise half an hour earlier each morning in order that she might walk a brisk mile or so on her way down-town, before taking the subway.

"But won't it tire you too much, Mother?" Jock had asked with maddeningly tender solicitude.

His mother's color heightened. Her blue eyes glowed dark.

"Look here, Jock! Will you kindly stop this lean-on-me-grandma stuff! To hear you talk one would think I was ready for a wheel chair and gray woolen bedroom slippers."

"Why, I didn't mean--I only thought that perhaps overexertion in a woman of your--That is, you need your energy for--"

"Don't wallow around in it," snapped Emma McChesney. "You'll only sink in deeper in your efforts to crawl out. I merely want to warn you that if you persist in this pose of tender solicitude for your doddering old mother, I'll--I'll present you with a stepfather a year younger than you. Don't laugh. Perhaps you think I couldn't do it."

"Good Lord, Mother! Of course you don't mean it, but--"

"Mean it! Cleverer women than I have been driven by their children to marrying bell-boys in self-defense. I warn you!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Good Lord, Mother! Of course you don't mean it, but--'"]

That stopped it--for a while. Jock ceased to bestow upon his mother judicious advice from the vast storehouse of his own experience. He refrained from breaking out with elaborate advertising schemes whereby the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company might grind every other skirt concern to dust. He gave only a startled look when his mother mischievously suggested raspberry as the color for her new autumn suit. Then, quite suddenly, Circ.u.mstance caught Emma McChesney in the meshes and, before she had fought her way free, wrought trouble and change upon her.

Jock McChesney was seated in the window of his mother's office at noon of a brilliant autumn day. A little impatient frown was forming between his eyes. He wanted his luncheon. He had called around expressly to take his mother out to luncheon--always a festive occasion when taken together. But Mrs. McChesney, seated at her desk, was bent absorbedly over a sheet of paper whereon she was adding up two columns of figures at a time--a trick on which she rather prided herself. She was counting aloud, her mind leaping agilely, thus:

"Eleven, twenty-nine, forty-three, sixty, sixty-nine--" Her pencil came down on the desk with a thwack. "SIXTY-NINE!" she repeated in capital letters. She turned around to face Jock. "Sixty-nine!" Her voice bristled with indignation. "Now what do you think of that!"

"I think you'd better make it an even seventy, whatever it is you're counting up, and come on out to luncheon. I've an appointment at two-fifteen, you know."

"Luncheon!"--she waved the paper in the air--"with this outrage on my mind! Nectar would curdle in my system."

Jock rose and strolled lazily over to the desk. "What is it?" He glanced idly at the sheet of paper. "Sixty-nine what?"

Mrs. McChesney pressed a buzzer at the side of her desk.

"Sixty-nine dollars, that's what! Representing two days' expenses in the six weeks' missionary trip that Fat Ed Meyers just made for us. And in Iowa, too."

"When you gave that fellow the job," began Jock hotly, "I told you, and Buck told you, that--"

Mrs. McChesney interrupted wearily. "Yes, I know. You'll never have a grander chance to say 'I told you so.' I hired him because he was out of a job and we needed a man who knew the Middle-Western trade, and then because--well, poor fellow, he begged so and promised to keep straight. As though I oughtn't to know that a pinochle-and-poker traveling man can never be anything but a pinochle-and-poker traveling man--"

The office door opened as there appeared in answer to the buzzer a very alert, very smiling, and very tidy office girl. Emma McChesney had tried office boys, and found them wanting.

"Tell Mr. Meyers I want to see him."

"Just going out to lunch,"--she turned like a race horse trembling to be off,--"putting on his overcoat in the front office. Shall I--"

"Catch him."

"Listen here," began Jock uncomfortably; "if you're going to call him perhaps I'd better vanish."