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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12677 ***
+
+  [Illustration: "'What is this anyway? A George Cohan comedy?'"]
+
+
+PERSONALITY PLUS
+
+ SOME EXPERIENCES OF EMMA McCHESNEY
+ AND HER SON, JOCK
+
+
+By
+
+EDNA FERBER
+
+AUTHOR OF "DAWN O'HARA," "BUTTERED SIDE DOWN,"
+"ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM," ETC.
+
+
+_WITH FIFTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG_
+
+
+NEW YORK
+FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
+1914
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+  I. MAKING GOOD WITH MOTHER
+
+ II. PERSONALITY PLUS
+
+III. DICTATED BUT NOT READ
+
+ IV. THE MAN WITHIN HIM
+
+  V. THE SELF-STARTER
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"'What is this anyway? A George Cohan comedy?'" _Frontispiece_
+
+"'You're a jealous blond,' he laughed"
+
+"He was the concentrated essence of do-it-now"
+
+"'Hi! Hold that pose!' called Von Herman"
+
+"With a jolt Jock realized she had forgotten all about him"
+
+"'Well, raw-thah!' he drawled"
+
+"... became in some miraculous way a little boy again"
+
+"Jock McChesney began to carry a yellow walking stick down to
+work"
+
+"'Good Lord, Mother! Of course you don't mean it, but--'"
+
+"'Greetings!'"
+
+"She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and looked up into the
+sullen, angry young face"
+
+"He made straight for the main desk with its battalion of clerks"
+
+"'Let's not waste any time,' he said"
+
+"He found his mother on the floor ... surrounded by piles of
+pajamas, socks, shirts and collars"
+
+"'Well, you said you wanted somebody to worry about, didn't you?'"
+
+
+
+
+
+PERSONALITY PLUS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+MAKING GOOD WITH MOTHER
+
+
+When men began to build cities vertically instead of horizontally
+there passed from our highways a picturesque figure, and from our
+language an expressive figure of speech. That oily-tongued,
+persuasive, soft-stepping stranger in the rusty Prince Albert and
+the black string tie who had been wont to haunt our back steps and
+front offices with his carefully wrapped bundle, retreated in
+bewildered defeat before the clanging blows of steel on steel that
+meant the erection of the first twenty-story skyscraper. "As
+slick," we used to say, "as a lightning-rod agent." Of what use
+his wares on a building whose tower was robed in clouds and which
+used the chain lightning for a necklace? The Fourth Avenue antique
+dealer had another curio to add to his collection of andirons,
+knockers, snuff boxes and warming pans.
+
+But even as this quaint figure vanished there sprang up a new and
+glittering one to take his place. He stood framed in the great
+plate-glass window of the very building which had brought about
+the defeat of his predecessor. A miracle of close shaving his face
+was, and a marvel of immaculateness his linen. Dapper he was, and
+dressy, albeit inclined to glittering effects and a certain
+plethory at the back of the neck. Back of him stood shining shapes
+that reflected his glory in enamel, and brass, and glass. His
+language was floral, but choice; his talk was of gearings and
+bearings and cylinders and magnetos; his method differed from that
+of him who went before as the method of a skilled aëronaut differs
+from that of the man who goes over Niagara in a barrel. And as he
+multiplied and spread over the land we coined a new figure of
+speech. "Smooth!" we chuckled. "As smooth as an automobile
+salesman."
+
+But even as we listened, fascinated by his fluent verbiage there
+grew within us a certain resentment. Familiarity with his
+glittering wares bred a contempt of them, so that he fell to
+speaking of them as necessities instead of luxuries. He juggled
+figures, and thought nothing of four of them in a row. We looked
+at our five-thousand-dollar salary, so strangely shrunken and thin
+now, and even as we looked we saw that the method of the unctuous,
+anxious stranger had become antiquated in its turn.
+
+Then from his ashes emerged a new being. Neither urger nor
+spellbinder he. The twentieth century was stamped across his brow,
+and on his lips was ever the word "Service." Silent, courteous,
+watchful, alert, he listened, while you talked. His method, in
+turn, made that of the silk-lined salesman sound like the hoarse
+hoots of the ballyhoo man at a county fair. Blithely he accepted
+five hundred thousand dollars and gave in return--a promise. And
+when we would search our soul for a synonym to express all that
+was low-voiced, and suave, and judicious, and patient, and sure,
+we began to say, "As alert as an advertising expert."
+
+Jock McChesney, looking as fresh and clear-eyed as only twenty-one
+and a cold shower can make one look, stood in the doorway of his
+mother's bedroom. His toilette had halted abruptly at the
+bathrobe stage. One of those bulky garments swathed his slim
+figure, while over his left arm hung a gray tweed Norfolk coat.
+From his right hand dangled a pair of trousers, in pattern a
+modish black-and-white.
+
+Jock regarded the gray garment on his arm with moody eyes.
+
+"Well, I'd like to know what's the matter with it!" he demanded, a
+trifle irritably.
+
+Emma McChesney, in the act of surveying her back hair in the
+mirror, paused, hand glass poised half way, to regard her son.
+
+"All right," she answered cheerfully. "I'll tell you. It's too
+young."
+
+"Young!" He held it at arm's length and stared at it. "What d'you
+mean--young?"
+
+Emma McChesney came forward, wrapping the folds of her kimono
+about her. She took the disputed garment in one hand and held it
+aloft. "I know that you look like a man on a magazine cover in it.
+But Norfolk suits spell tennis, and seashore, and elegant leisure.
+And you're going out this morning, Son, to interview business men.
+You're going to try to impress the advertising world with the fact
+that it needs your expert services. You walk into a business
+office in a Norfolk suit, and everybody from the office boy to the
+president of the company will ask you what your score is."
+
+She tossed it back over his arm.
+
+"I'll wear the black and white," said Jock resignedly, and turned
+toward his own room. At his doorway he paused and raised his voice
+slightly: "For that matter, they're looking for young men.
+Everybody's young. Why, the biggest men in the advertising game
+are just kids." He disappeared within his room, still talking.
+"Look at McQuirk, advertising manager of the Combs Car Company.
+He's so young he has to disguise himself in bone-trimmed
+eye-glasses with a black ribbon to get away with it. Look at
+Hopper, of the Berg, Shriner Company. Pulls down ninety thousand a
+year, and if he's thirty-five I'll--"
+
+"Well, you asked my advice," interrupted his mother's voice with
+that muffled effect which is caused by a skirt being slipped over
+the head, "and I gave it. Wear a white duck sailor suit with blue
+anchors and carry a red tin pail and a shovel, if you want to look
+young. Only get into it in a jiffy, Son, because breakfast will be
+ready in ten minutes. I can tell by the way Annie's crashing the
+cups. So step lively if you want to pay your lovely mother's
+subway fare."
+
+Ten minutes later the slim young figure, in its English-fitting
+black and white, sat opposite Emma McChesney at the breakfast
+table and between excited gulps of coffee outlined a meteoric
+career in his chosen field. And the more he talked and the rosier
+his figures of speech became, the more silent and thoughtful fell
+his mother. She wondered if five o'clock would find a droop to the
+set of those young shoulders; if the springy young legs in their
+absurdly scant modish trousers would have lost some of their
+elasticity; if the buoyant step in the flat-heeled shoes would not
+drag a little. Thirteen years of business experience had taught
+her to swallow smilingly the bitter pill of rebuff. But this boy
+was to experience his first dose to-day. She felt again that
+sensation of almost physical nausea--that sickness of heart and
+spirit which had come over her when she had met her first sneer
+and intolerant shrug. It had been her maiden trip on the road for
+the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. She was secretary of
+that company now, and moving spirit in its policy. But the wound
+of that first insult still ached. A word from her would have
+placed the boy and saved him from curt refusals. She withheld that
+word. He must fight his fight alone.
+
+"I want to write the kind of ad," Jock was saying excitedly, "that
+you see 'em staring at in the subways, and street cars and
+L-trains. I want to sit across the aisle and watch their up-turned
+faces staring at that oblong, and reading it aloud to each other."
+
+"Isn't that an awfully obvious necktie you're wearing, Jock?"
+inquired his mother irrelevantly.
+
+"This? You ought to see some of them. This is a Quaker stock in
+comparison." He glanced down complacently at the vivid-hued silken
+scarf that the season's mode demanded. Immediately he was off
+again. "And the first thing you know, Mrs. McChesney, ma'am, we'll
+have a motor truck backing up at the door once a month and six
+strong men carrying my salary to the freight elevator in sacks."
+
+Emma McChesney buttered her bit of toast, then looked up to remark
+quietly:
+
+"Hadn't you better qualify for the trial heats, Jock, before you
+jump into the finals?"
+
+"Trial heats!" sneered Jock. "They're poky. I want real money.
+Now! It isn't enough to be just well-to-do in these days. It needs
+money. I want to be rich! Not just prosperous, but rich! So rich
+that I can let the bath soap float around in the water without any
+pricks of conscience. So successful that they'll say, 'And he's a
+mere boy, too. Imagine!'"
+
+And, "Jock dear," Emma McChesney said, "you've still to learn that
+plans and ambitions are like soap bubbles. The harder you blow and
+the more you inflate them, the quicker they burst. Plans and
+ambitions are things to be kept locked away in your heart, Son,
+with no one but yourself to take an occasional peep at them."
+
+Jock leaned over the table, with his charming smile. "You're a
+jealous blonde," he laughed. "Because I'm going to be a captain of
+finance--an advertising wizard; you're afraid I'll grab the glory
+all away from you."
+
+  [Illustration: "'You're a jealous blond,' he said"]
+
+Mrs. McChesney folded her napkin and rose. She looked unbelievably
+young, and trim, and radiant, to be the mother of this boasting
+boy.
+
+"I'm not afraid," she drawled, a wicked little glint in her blue
+eyes. "You see, they'll only regard your feats and say, 'H'm, no
+wonder. He ought to be able to sell ice to an Eskimo. His mother
+was Emma McChesney.'"
+
+And then, being a modern mother, she donned smart autumn hat and
+tailored suit coat and stood ready to reach her office by
+nine-thirty. But because she was as motherly as she was modern she
+swung open the door between kitchen and dining-room to advise with
+Annie, the adept.
+
+"Lamb chops to-night, eh, Annie? And sweet potatoes. Jock loves
+'em. And corn au gratin and some head lettuce." She glanced toward
+Jock in the hallway, then lowered her voice. "Annie," she teased,
+"just give us one of your peach cobblers, will you? You see
+he--he's going to be awfully--tired when he gets home."
+
+So they went stepping off to work together, mother and son. A
+mother of twenty-five years before would have watched her son
+with tear-dimmed eyes from the vine-wreathed porch of a cottage.
+There was no watching a son from the tenth floor of an up-town
+apartment house. Besides, she had her work to do. The subway
+swallowed both of them. Together they jostled and swung their way
+down-town in the close packed train. At the Twenty-third Street
+station Jock left her.
+
+"You'll have dinner to-night with a full-fledged professional
+gent," he bragged, in his youth and exuberance and was off down
+the aisle and out on the platform. Emma McChesney managed to turn
+in her nine-inch space of train seat so that she watched the slim,
+buoyant young figure from the window until the train drew away and
+he was lost in the stairway jam. Just so Rachel had watched the
+boy Joseph go to meet the Persian caravans in the desert.
+
+"Don't let them buffalo you, Jock," Emma had said, just before he
+left her. "They'll try it. If they give you a broom and tell you
+to sweep down the back stairs, take it, and sweep, and don't
+forget the corners. And if, while you're sweeping, you notice that
+that kind of broom isn't suited to the stairs go in and suggest a
+new kind. They'll like it."
+
+Brooms and back stairways had no place in Jock McChesney's mind as
+the mahogany and gold elevator shot him up to the fourteenth floor
+of the great office building that housed the Berg, Shriner
+Company. Down the marble hallway he went and into the reception
+room. A cruel test it was, that reception room, with the cruelty
+peculiar to the modern in business. With its soft-shaded lamp, its
+two-toned rug, its Jacobean chairs, its magazine-laden cathedral
+oak table, its pot of bright flowers making a smart touch of color
+in the somber richness of the room, it was no place for the
+shabby, the down-and-out, the cringing, the rusty, or the
+mendicant.
+
+Jock McChesney, from the tips of his twelve-dollar shoes to his
+radiant face, took the test and stood it triumphantly. He had
+entered with an air in which was mingled the briskness of
+assurance with the languor of ease. There were times when Jock
+McChesney was every inch the son of his mother.
+
+There advanced toward Jock a large, plump, dignified personage, a
+personage courteous, yet reserved, inquiring, yet not offensively
+curious--a very Machiavelli of reception-room ushers. Even while
+his lips questioned, his eyes appraised clothes, character,
+conduct.
+
+"Mr. Hupp, please," said Jock, serene in the perfection of his
+shirt, tie, collar and scarf pin, upon which the appraising eye
+now rested. "Mr. McChesney." He produced a card.
+
+"Appointment?"
+
+"No--but he'll see me."
+
+But Machiavelli had seen too many overconfident callers. Their
+very confidence had taught him caution.
+
+"If you will please state your--ah--business--"
+
+Jock smiled a little patient smile and brushed an imaginary fleck
+of dust from the sleeve of his very correct coat.
+
+"I want to ask him for a job as office boy," he jibed.
+
+An answering grin overspread the fat features of the usher. Even
+an usher likes his little joke. The sense of humor dies hard.
+
+"I have a letter from him, asking me to call," said Jock, to
+clinch it.
+
+"This way." The keeper of the door led Jock toward the sacred
+inner portal and held it open. "Mr. Hupp's is the last door to the
+right."
+
+The door closed behind him. Jock found himself in the big, busy,
+light-flooded central office. Down either side of the great room
+ran a row of tiny private offices, each partitioned off, each
+outfitted with desk, and chairs, and a big, bright window. On his
+way to the last door at the right Jock glanced into each tiny
+office, glimpsing busy men bent absorbedly over papers, girls busy
+with dictation, here and there a door revealing two men, or three,
+deep in discussion of a problem, heads close together, voices
+low, faces earnest. It came suddenly to the smartly modish,
+overconfident boy walking the length of the long room that
+the last person needed in this marvelously perfected and
+smooth-running organization was a somewhat awed young man named
+Jock McChesney. There came to him that strange sensation which
+comes to every job-hunter; that feeling of having his spiritual
+legs carry him out of the room, past the door, down the hall and
+into the street, even as, in reality, they bore him on to the very
+presence which he dreaded and yet wished to see.
+
+Two steps more, and he stood in the last doorway, right. No
+matinee idol, nervously awaiting his cue in the wings, could have
+planned his entrance more carefully than Jock had planned this.
+Ease was the thing; ease, bordering on nonchalance, mixed with a
+brisk and businesslike assurance.
+
+The entrance was lost on the man at the desk. He did not even look
+up. If Jock had entered on all-fours, doing a double tango to
+vocal accompaniment, it is doubtful if the man at the desk would
+have looked up. Pencil between his fingers, head held a trifle to
+one side in critical contemplation of the work before him, eyes
+narrowed judicially, lips pursed, he was the concentrated essence
+of do-it-now.
+
+  [Illustration: "He was the concentrated essence of do-it-now"]
+
+Jock waited a moment, in silence. The man at the desk worked on.
+His head was semi-bald. Jock knew him to be thirty. Jock fixed his
+eye on the semi-bald spot and spoke.
+
+"My name's McChesney," he began. "I wrote you three days ago; you
+probably will remember. You replied, asking me to call, and I--"
+
+"Minute," exploded the man at the desk, still absorbed.
+
+Jock faltered, stopped. The man at the desk did not look up. A
+moment of silence, except for the sound of the busy pencil
+traveling across the paper. Jock, glaring at the semi-bald spot,
+spoke again.
+
+"Of course, Mr. Hupp, if you're too busy to see me--"
+
+"M-m-m-m," a preoccupied hum, such as a busy man makes when he is
+trying to give attention to two interests.
+
+"--why I suppose there's no sense in staying; but it seems to me
+that common courtesy--"
+
+The busy pencil paused, quivered in the making of a final period,
+enclosed the dot in a proofreader's circle, and rolled away across
+the desk, its work done.
+
+"Now," said Sam Hupp, and swung around, smiling, to face the
+affronted Jock. "I had to get that out. They're waiting for it."
+He pressed a desk button. "What can I do for you? Sit down, sit
+down."
+
+There was a certain abrupt geniality about him. His
+tortoise-rimmed glasses gave him an oddly owlish look, like a
+small boy taking liberties with grandfather's spectacles.
+
+Jock found himself sitting down, his anger slipping from him.
+
+"My name's McChesney," he began. "I'm here because I want to work
+for this concern." He braced himself to present the convincing,
+reason-why arguments with which he had prepared himself.
+
+Whereupon Sam Hupp, the brisk, proceeded to whisk his breath and
+arguments away with an unexpected:
+
+"All right. What do you want to do?"
+
+Jock's mouth fell open. "Do!" he stammered. "Do! Why--anything--"
+
+Sam Hupp's quick eye swept over the slim, attractive, radiant,
+correctly-garbed young figure before him. Unconsciously he rubbed
+his bald spot with a rueful hand.
+
+"Know anything about writing, or advertising?"
+
+Jock was at ease immediately. "Quite a lot; yes. I practically
+rewrote the Gridiron play that we gave last year, and I was
+assistant advertising manager of the college publications for
+two years. That gives a fellow a pretty broad knowledge of
+advertising."
+
+"Oh, Lord!" groaned Sam Hupp, and covered his eyes with his hand,
+as if in pain.
+
+Jock stared. The affronted feeling was returning. Sam Hupp
+recovered himself and smiled a little wistfully.
+
+"McChesney, when I came up here twelve years ago I got a job as
+reception-room usher. A reception-room usher is an office boy in
+long pants. Sometimes, when I'm optimistic, I think that if I live
+twelve years longer I'll begin to know something about the
+rudiments of this game."
+
+"Oh, of course," began Jock, apologetically. But Hupp's glance was
+over his head. Involuntarily Jock turned to follow the direction
+of his eyes.
+
+"Busy?" said a voice from the doorway.
+
+"Come in, Dutch! Come in!" boomed Hupp.
+
+The man who entered was of the sort that the boldest might well
+hesitate to address as "Dutch"--a tall, slim, elegant figure,
+Van-dyked, bronzed.
+
+"McChesney, this is Von Herman, head of our art department."
+
+Their hands met in a brief clasp. Von Herman's thoughts were
+evidently elsewhere.
+
+"Just wanted to tell you that that cussed model's skipped out.
+Gone with a show. Just when I had the whole series blocked out in
+my mind. He was a wonder. No brains, but a marvel for looks and
+style. These people want real stuff. Don't know how I'm going to
+give it to them now."
+
+Hupp sat up. "Got to!" he snapped. "Campaign's late, as it is.
+Can't you get an ordinary man model and fake the Greek god
+beauty?"
+
+"Yes--but it'll look faked. If I could lay my hands on a chap who
+could wear clothes as if they belonged to him--"
+
+Hupp rose. "Here's your man," he cried, with a snap of his
+fingers. "Clothes! Look at him. He invented 'em. Why, you could
+photograph him and he'd look like a drawing."
+
+Von Herman turned, surprised, incredulous, hopeful, his artist eye
+brightening at the ease and grace and modishness of the smart,
+well-knit figure before him.
+
+"Me!" exploded Jock, his face suffused with a dull, painful red.
+"Me! Pose! For a clothing ad!"
+
+"Well," Hupp reminded him, "you said you'd do anything."
+
+Jock McChesney glared belligerently. Hupp returned the stare with
+a faint gleam of amusement shining behind the absurd glasses. The
+amused look changed to surprise as he beheld the glare in Jock's
+eyes fading. For even as he glared there had come a warning to
+Jock--a warning sent just in time from that wireless station
+located in his subconscious mind. A vivid face, full of pride, and
+hope, and encouragement flashed before him.
+
+"Jock," it said, "don't let 'em buffalo you. They'll try it. If
+they give you a broom and tell you to sweep down the back
+stairs--"
+
+Jock was smiling his charming, boyish smile.
+
+"Lead me to your north light," he laughed at Von Herman. "Got any
+Robert W. Chambers's heroines tucked away there?"
+
+Hupp's broad hand came down on his shoulder with a thwack. "That's
+the spirit, McChesney! That's the--" He stopped, abruptly. "Say,
+are you related to Mrs. Emma McChesney, of the Featherloom Skirt
+Company?"
+
+"Slightly. She's my one and only mother."
+
+"She--you mean--her son! Well I'll be darned!" He held out his
+hand to Jock. "If you're a real son of your mother I wish you'd
+just call the office boy as you step down the hall with Von Herman
+and tell him to bring me a hammer and a couple of spikes. I'd
+better nail down my desk."
+
+"I'll promise not to crowd you for a year or two," grinned Jock
+from the doorway, and was off with the pleased Von Herman.
+
+Past the double row of beehives again, into the elevator, out
+again, up a narrow iron stairway, into a busy, cluttered,
+skylighted room. Pictures, posters, photographs hung all about.
+Some of the pictures Jock recognized as old friends that had gazed
+familiarly at him from subway trains and street cars and theater
+programmes. Golf clubs, tennis rackets, walking sticks, billiard
+cues were stacked up in corners. And yet there was a bare and
+orderly look about the place. Two silent, shirt-sleeved men were
+busy at drawing boards. Through a doorway beyond Jock could see
+others similarly engaged in the next room. On a platform in one
+corner of the room posed a young man in one of those costumes the
+coat of which is a mongrel mixture of cutaway and sack. You see
+them worn by clergymen with unsecular ideas in dress, and by the
+leader of the counterfeiters' gang in the moving pictures. The
+pose was that met with in the backs of magazines--the head lifted,
+eyes fixed on an interesting object unseen, one arm crooked to
+hold a cane, one foot advanced, the other trailing slightly to
+give a Fifth Avenue four o'clock air. His face was expressionless.
+On his head was a sadly unironed silk hat.
+
+Von Herman glanced at the drawing tacked to the board of one of
+the men. "That'll do, Flynn," he said to the model. He glanced
+again at the drawing. "Bring out the hat a little more, Mack. They
+won't burnish it if you don't,"--to the artist. Then, turning
+about, "Where's that girl?"
+
+From a far corner, sheltered by long green curtains, stepped a
+graceful almost childishly slim figure in a bronze-green Norfolk
+suit and close-fitting hat from beneath which curled a fluff of
+bright golden hair. Von Herman stared at her.
+
+"You're not the girl," he said. "You won't do."
+
+"You sent for me," retorted the girl. "I'm Miss Michelin--Gelda
+Michelin. I posed for you six months ago, but I've been out of
+town with the show since then."
+
+Von Herman, frowning, opened a table drawer, pulled out a card
+index, ran his long fingers through it and extracted a card. He
+glanced at it, and then, the frown deepening, read it aloud.
+
+"'Michelin, Gelda. Telephone Bryant 4759. Brunette. Medium build.
+Good neck and eyes. Good figure. Good clothes.'"
+
+He glanced up. "Well?"
+
+"That's me," said Miss Michelin calmly. "I've got the same
+telephone number and eyes and neck and clothes. Of course my hair
+is different and I am thinner, but that's business. I'd like to
+know what chance a fat girl would have in the chorus these days."
+
+Von Herman groaned. "I'll pay you for the time you've waited and
+for your trouble. Can't use you for these pictures." Then as she
+left he turned a comically despairing face to the two men at the
+drawing boards. "What are we going to do? We've got to make a
+start on these pictures and everything has gone wrong. They want
+something special. Two figures, young man and woman. Said
+expressly they didn't want a chicken. No romping curls and none of
+that eyes and lips fool-girl stuff. This chap's ideal for the
+man." He pointed to Jock.
+
+Jock had been staring, fascinated, at the shaded, zigzag marks
+which the artist--dark-skinned, velvet-eyed, foreign-looking
+youth--was making on the sheet of paper before him. He had
+scarcely glanced up during the entire scene. Now he looked briefly
+and coolly at Jock.
+
+"Where did you get him?" he asked, with the precise enunciation of
+the foreign-born. "Good figure. And he wears his clothes not like
+a cab driver, as the others do."
+
+"Thanks," drawled Jock, flushing a little. Then, boyish curiosity
+getting the better of him, "Say, tell me, what in the world are
+you doing to that drawing?"
+
+He of the velvety eyes smiled a twisted little smile. His slim
+brown fingers never stopped in their work of guiding the pen in
+its zigzag path.
+
+"It is work," he sneered, "to delight the soul of an artist. I am
+now engaged in the pleasing task of putting the bones in a
+herringbone suit."
+
+But Jock did not smile. Here was another man, he thought, who had
+been given a broom and told to sweep down the stairway.
+
+Von Herman was regarding him almost wistfully. "I hate to let you
+slip," he said. Then, his face brightening, "By Jove! I wonder if
+Miss Galt would pose for us if we told her what a fix we were in."
+
+He picked up the telephone receiver. "Miss Galt, please," he said.
+Then, aside, "Of course it's nerve to ask a girl who's earning
+three thousand a year to leave her desk and come up and pose
+for--Hello! Miss Galt?"
+
+Jock, seated on the edge of the models' platform, was beginning to
+enjoy himself. Even this end of the advertising business had its
+interesting side, he thought. Ten minutes later he knew it had.
+
+Ten minutes later there appeared Miss Galt. Jock left off
+swinging his legs from the platform and stood up. Miss Galt was
+that kind of girl. Smooth black hair parted and coiled low as only
+an exquisitely shaped head can dare to wear its glory-crown. A
+face whose expression was sweetly serious in spite of its youth. A
+girl whose clothes were the sort of clothes that girls ought to
+wear in offices, and don't.
+
+"This is mighty good of you, Miss Galt," began Von Herman. "It's
+the Kool Komfort Klothes Company's summer campaign stuff. We'll
+only need you for an hour or so--to get the expression and general
+outline. Poster stuff, really. Then this young man will pose for
+the summer union suit pictures."
+
+"Don't apologize," said Miss Galt. "We had a hard enough time to
+get that Kool Komfort account. We don't want to start wrong with
+the pictures. Besides, I think posing's real fun."
+
+Jock thought so too, quite suddenly. Just as suddenly Von Herman
+remembered the conventions and introduced them.
+
+"McChesney?" repeated Miss Galt, crisply. "I know a Mrs.
+McChesney, of the T.A. Buck--"
+
+"My mother," proudly.
+
+"Your mother! Then why--" She stopped.
+
+"Because," said Jock, "I'm the rawest rooky in the Berg, Shriner
+Company. And when I begin to realize what I don't know about
+advertising I'll probably want to plunge off the Palisades."
+
+Miss Galt smiled up at him, her clear, frank eyes meeting his.
+
+"You'll win," she said.
+
+"Even if I lose--I win now," said Jock, suddenly audacious.
+
+"Hi! Hold that pose!" called Von Herman, happily.
+
+  [Illustration: "'Hi! Hold that pose!' called Von Herman"]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+PERSONALITY PLUS
+
+There are seven stages in the evolution of that individual whose
+appearance is the signal for a listless "Who-do-you-want-to-see?"
+from the white-bloused, drab-haired, anæmic little girl who sits
+in the outer office forever reading last month's magazines. The
+badge of fear brands the novice. Standing hat in hand, nervous,
+apprehensive, gulpy, with the elevator door clanging behind him,
+and the sacred inner door closed before him, he offers up a silent
+and paradoxical "Thank heaven!" at the office girl's languid "Not
+in," and dives into the friendly shelter of the next elevator
+going down. When, at that same message, he can smile, as with a
+certain grim agreeableness he says, "I'll wait," then has he
+reached the seventh stage, and taken the orders of the regularly
+ordained.
+
+Jock McChesney had learned to judge an unknown prospective by
+glancing at his hall rug and stenographer, which marks the fifth
+stage. He had learned to regard office boys with something less
+than white-hot hate. He had learned to let the other fellow do the
+talking. He had learned to condense a written report into
+twenty-five words. And he had learned that there was as much
+difference between the profession of advertising as he had thought
+of it and advertising as it really was, as there is between a
+steam calliope and a cathedral pipe organ.
+
+In the big office of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company they
+had begun to chuckle a bit over the McChesney solicitor's reports.
+Those same reports indicated that young McChesney was beginning to
+find the key to that maddening jumble of complexities known as
+human nature. Big Sam Hupp, who was the pet caged copy-writing
+genius of the place, used even to bring an occasional example of
+Jock's business badinage into the Old Man's office, and the two
+would grin in secret. As when they ran thus:
+
+    _Pepsinale Manufacturing Company_:
+
+    Mr. Bowser is the kind of gentleman who curses his
+    subordinates in front of the whole office force. Very touchy.
+    Crumpled his advertising manager. Our chance to get at him is
+    when he is in one of his rare good humors.
+
+Or:
+
+    _E.V. Kreiss Company_:
+
+    Kreiss very difficult to reach. Permanent address seems to be
+    Italy, Egypt, and other foreign ports. Occasionally his
+    instructions come from Palm Beach.
+
+At which there rose up before the reader a vision of Kreiss
+himself--baggy-eyed, cultivated English accent, interested in
+polo, fast growing contemptuous of things American.
+
+Or still another:
+
+    _Hodge Manufacturing Company:_
+
+    Mr. Hodge is a very conservative gentleman. Sits still and
+    lets others do the talking. Has gained quite a reputation for
+    business acumen with this one attribute. Spent $500 last year.
+    Holding his breath preparatory to taking another plunge.
+
+It was about the time that Jock McChesney had got over the novelty
+of paying for his own clothes, and had begun to talk business in a
+slightly patronizing way to his clever and secretly amused mother,
+Mrs. Emma McChesney, secretary of the T.A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company, that Sam Hupp noticed a rather cocky
+over-assurance in Jock's attitude toward the world in general.
+Whereupon he sent for him.
+
+On Sam Hupp's broad flat desk stood an array of diminutive jars,
+and bottles, and tiny pots that would have shamed the toilette
+table of a musical comedy star's dressing-room. There were
+rose-tinted salves in white bottles. There were white creams in
+rose-tinted jars. There were tins of ointment and boxes of
+fragrant soap.
+
+Jock McChesney, entering briskly, eyed the array in some surprise.
+Then he grinned, and glanced wickedly at Sam Hupp's prematurely
+bald head.
+
+"No use, Mr. Hupp. They say if it's once gone it's gone. Get a
+toupee."
+
+"Shut up!" growled Sam Hupp, good-humoredly. "Stay in this game
+long enough and you'll be a hairless wonder yourself. Ten years
+ago the girls used to have to tie their hands or wear mittens to
+keep from running their white fingers through my waving silken
+locks. Sit down a minute."
+
+Jock reached forward and took up a jar of cream. He frowned in
+thought. Then: "Thought I recognized this stuff. Mother uses it.
+I've seen it on the bathroom shelf."
+
+"You bet she uses it," retorted Sam Hupp. "What's more, millions
+of other women will be using it in the next few years. This
+woman," he pointed to the name on the label, "has hit upon the
+real thing in toilette flub-dub. She's made a little fortune
+already, and if she don't look out she'll be rich. They've got
+quite a plant. When she started she used to put the stuff together
+herself over the kitchen stove. They say it's made of cottage
+cheese, stirred smooth and tinted pink. Well, anyway they're
+nationally known now--or will be when they start to advertise
+right."
+
+"I've seen some of their stuff advertised--somewhere," interrupted
+Jock, "but I don't remember--"
+
+"There you are. You see the head of this concern is a little bit
+frightened at the way she seems slated to become a lady cold cream
+magnate. They say she's scared pink for fear somebody will steal
+her recipes. She has a kid nephew who acts as general manager, and
+they're both on the job all the time. They say the lady herself
+looks like the spinster in a b'gosh drama. You can get a boy to
+look up your train schedule."
+
+Train! Schedule! Across Jock McChesney's mind there flashed a
+vision of himself, alert, confident, brisk, taking the luxurious
+nine o'clock for Philadelphia. Or, maybe, the Limited to Chicago.
+Dashing down to the station in a taxi, of course. Strolling down
+the car aisle to take his place among those other thoroughbreds of
+commerce--men whose chamois gloves and walking sticks, and talk of
+golf and baseball and motoring spelled elegant leisure, even as
+their keen eyes and shrewd faces and low-voiced exchange of such
+terms as "stocks," and "sales" and "propositions" proclaimed them
+intent on bagging the day's business. Sam Hupp's next words
+brought him back to reality with a jerk.
+
+"I think you have to change at Buffalo. It gets you to Tonawanda
+in the morning. Rotten train."
+
+"Tonawanda!" repeated Jock.
+
+"Now listen, kid." Sam Hupp leaned forward, and his eyes behind
+their great round black-rimmed glasses were intent on Jock. "I'm
+not going to try to steer you. You think that advertising is a
+game. It isn't. There are those who think it's a science. But it
+isn't that either. It's white magic, that's what it is. And you
+can't learn it from books, any more than you can master trout
+fishing from reading 'The Complete Angler.'" He swung about and
+swept the beauty lotions before him in a little heap at the end of
+his desk. "Here, take this stuff. And get chummy with it. Eat it,
+if necessary; learn it somehow."
+
+Jock stood up, a little dazed. "But, what!--How?--I mean--"
+
+Sam Hupp glanced up at him. "Sending you down there isn't my idea.
+It's the Old Man's. He's got an idea that you--" He paused and put
+a detaining hand on Jock McChesney's arm. "Look here. You think I
+know a little something about advertising, don't you?"
+
+"You!" laughed Jock. "You're the guy who put the whitening in the
+Great White Way. Everybody knows you were the--"
+
+"M-m-m, thanks," interrupted Sam Hupp, a little dryly. "Let me
+tell you something, young 'un. I've got what you might call a
+thirty-horse-power mind. I keep it running on high all the time,
+with the muffler cut out, and you can hear me coming for miles.
+But the Old Man,"--he leaned forward impressively,--"the Old Man,
+boy, has the eighty-power kind, built like a watch--no smoke, no
+dripping, and you can't even hear the engine purr. But when he
+throws her open! Well, he can pass everything on the road. Don't
+forget that." He turned to his desk again and reached for a stack
+of papers and cuts. "Good luck to you. If you want any further
+details you can get 'em from Hayes." He plunged into his work.
+
+There arose in Jock McChesney's mind that instinct of the man in
+his hour of triumph--the desire to tell a woman of his greatness.
+He paused a second outside Sam Hupp's office, turned, and walked
+quickly down the length of the great central room. He stopped
+before a little glass door at the end, tapped lightly, and
+entered.
+
+Grace Galt, copy-writer, looked up, frowning a little. Then she
+smiled. Miss Galt had a complete layout on the desk before
+her--scrap books, cuts, copy, magazines. There was a little smudge
+on the end of her nose. Grace Galt was writing about magnetos.
+She was writing about magnetos in a way to make you want to drop
+your customer, or your ironing, or your game, and go downtown and
+buy that particular kind of magneto at once. Which is the
+secretest part of the wizardry of advertising copy. To look at
+Grace Galt you would have thought that she should have been
+writing about the rose-tinted jars in Jock McChesney's hands
+instead of about such things as ignition, and insulation, and ball
+bearings, and induction windings. But it was Grace Galt's gift
+that she could take just such hard, dry, technical facts and weave
+them into a story that you followed to the end. She could make you
+see the romance in condensers and transformers. She had the power
+that caused the reader to lose himself in the charm of magnetic
+poles, and ball bearings, and high-tension sparks.
+
+"Just dropped in to say good-by," said Jock, very casually. "Going
+to run up-state to see the Athena Company--toilette specialties,
+you know. It ought to be a big account."
+
+"Athena?" Grace Galt regarded him absently, her mind still on her
+work. Then her eyes cleared. "You mean at Tonawanda? And they're
+sending you! Well!" She put out a congratulatory hand. Jock
+gripped it gratefully.
+
+"Not so bad, eh?" he boasted.
+
+"Bad!" echoed Grace Galt. Her face became serious. "Do you realize
+that there are men in this office who have been here for five
+years, six years, or even more, and who have never been given a
+chance to do anything but stenography, or perhaps some private
+secretarying?"
+
+"I know it," agreed Jock. But there was no humbleness in his tone.
+He radiated self-satisfaction. He seemed to grow and expand before
+her eyes. A little shadow of doubt crept across Grace Galt's
+expression of friendly interest.
+
+"Are you scared," she asked; "just the least bit?"
+
+Jock flushed a little. "Well," he confessed ruefully, "I don't
+mind telling you I am--a little."
+
+"Good!"
+
+"Good?"
+
+"Yes. The head of that concern is a woman. That's one reason why
+they didn't send me, I suppose. I--I'd like to say something, if
+you don't mind."
+
+"Anything you like," said Jock graciously.
+
+"Well, then, don't be afraid of being embarrassed and fussed. If
+you blush and stammer a little, she'll like it. Play up the coy
+stuff."
+
+"The coy stuff!" echoed Jock. "I hadn't thought much about my
+attitude toward the--er--the lady,"--a little stiffly.
+
+"Well, you'd better," answered Miss Galt crisply. She put out her
+hand in much the same manner as Sam Hupp had used. "Good luck to
+you. I'll have to ask you to go now. I'm trying to make this
+magneto sound like something without which no home is complete,
+and to make people see that there's as much difference between it
+and every other magneto as there is between the steam shovels that
+dug out the Panama Canal and the junk that the French left
+there--" She stopped. Her eyes took on a far-away look. Her lips
+were parted slightly. "Why, that's not a bad idea--that last. I'll
+use that. I'll--"
+
+  [Illustration: "With a jolt Jock realized she had forgotten all
+  about him"]
+
+She began to scribble rapidly on the sheet of paper before her.
+With a jolt Jock McChesney realized that she had forgotten all
+about him. He walked quietly to the door, opened it, shut it very
+quietly, then made for the nearest telephone. He knew one woman he
+could count on to be proud of him. He gave his number, waited a
+little eager moment, then:
+
+"Featherloom Petticoat Company? Mrs. McChesney." And waited again.
+Then he smiled.
+
+"You needn't sound so official," he laughed; "it's only your son.
+Listen. I"--he took on an elaborate carelessness of tone--"I've
+got to take a little jump out of town. On business. Oh, a day or
+so. Rather important though. I'll have time to run up to the flat
+and throw a few things into a bag. I'll tell you, I really ought
+to keep a bag packed down here. In case of emergency, you know.
+What? It's the Athena Toilette Preparations Company. Well, I
+should say it is! I'll wire you. You bet. Thanks. My what? Oh,
+toothbrush. No. Good-by."
+
+So it was that at three-ten Jock McChesney took himself, his
+hopes, his dread, and his smart walrus bag aboard a train that
+halted and snuffed and backed, and bumped and halted with
+maddening frequency. But it landed him at last in a little town
+bearing the characteristics of all American little towns. It was
+surprisingly full of six-cylinder cars, and five and ten-cent
+stores, and banks with Doric columns, and paved streets.
+
+After he had registered at the hotel, and as he was cleaning up a
+bit, he passed an amused eye over the bare, ugly, fusty little
+hotel bedroom. But somehow, as he stood in the middle of the room,
+a graceful, pleasing figure of youth and confidence, the smile
+faded. Towel in hand he surveyed the barrenness of it. He stared
+at the impossible wall paper, at the battered furniture, the worn
+carpet. He sniffed the stuffy smell of--what was that smell,
+anyhow?--straw, and matting, and dust, and the ghost-odor of
+hundreds who had occupied the room before him. It came over him
+with something of a shock that this same sort of room had been his
+mother's only home in the ten years she had spent on the road as a
+traveling saleswoman for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
+Company. This was what she had left in the morning. To this she
+had come back at night. As he stared ahead of him there rose
+before him a mental picture of her--the brightness of her, the
+sunniness, the indomitable energy, and pluck, and courage. With a
+sudden burst of new determination he wadded the towel into a moist
+ball, flung it at the washstand, seized hat, coat, and gloves, and
+was off down the hall. So it was with something of his mother's
+splendid courage in his heart, but with nothing of her canny
+knowledge in his head, Jock McChesney fared forth to do battle
+with the merciless god Business.
+
+It was ten-thirty of a brilliant morning just two days later that
+a buoyant young figure swung into an elevator in the great office
+building that housed the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Just
+one more grain of buoyant swing and the young man's walk might
+have been termed a swagger. As it was, his walrus bag just saved
+him.
+
+Stepping out of the lift he walked, as from habit, to the little
+unlettered door which admitted employes to the big, bright, inner
+office. But he did not use it. Instead he turned suddenly and
+walked down the hall to the double door which led into the
+reception room. He threw out his legs stiffly and came down rather
+flat-footed, the way George Cohan does when he's pleased with
+himself in the second act.
+
+"Hel-lo, Mack!" he called out jovially.
+
+Mack, the usher, so called from his Machiavellian qualities,
+turned to survey the radiant young figure before him.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. McChesney," he made answer smoothly. Mack
+never forgot himself. His keen eye saw the little halo of
+self-satisfaction that hovered above Jock McChesney's head. "A
+successful trip, I see."
+
+Jock McChesney laughed a little, pleased, conscious laugh. "Well,
+raw-thah!" he drawled, and opened the door leading into the main
+office. He had been loath to lose one crumb of the savor of it.
+
+  [Illustration: "'Well, raw-thah!' he drawled"]
+
+Still smiling, he walked to his own desk, with a nod here and
+there, dropped his bag, took off coat and hat, selected a
+cigarette, tapped it smartly, lighted it, and was off down the big
+room to the little cubby-hole at the other end. But Sam Hupp's
+plump, keen, good-humored face did not greet him as he entered.
+The little room was deserted. Frowning, Jock sank into the empty
+desk chair. He cradled his head in his hands, tilted the chair,
+pursed his mouth over the slender white cylinder and squinted his
+eyes up toward the lazy blue spirals of smoke--the very picture
+of content and satisfaction.
+
+Hupp was in attending some conference in the Old Man's office, of
+course. He wished they'd hurry. The business of the week was being
+boiled-down there. Those conferences were great cauldrons into
+which the day's business, or the week's, was dumped, to be boiled,
+simmered, stirred, skimmed, cooled. Jock had never been privileged
+to attend one of these meetings. Perhaps by this time next week he
+might have a spoon in the stirring too--
+
+There came the murmur of voices as a door was opened. The voices
+came nearer. Then quick footsteps. Jock recognized them. He rose,
+smiling. Sam Hupp, vibrating electric energy, breezed in.
+
+"Oh--hello!" he said, surprised. Jock's smile widened to a grin.
+"You back?"
+
+"Hello, Hupp," he said, coolly. It was the first time that he had
+omitted the prefix. "You just bet I'm back."
+
+There flashed across Sam Hupp's face a curious little look. The
+next instant it was gone.
+
+"Well," said Jock, and took a long breath.
+
+"Mr. Berg wants to see you."
+
+Hupp plunged into his work.
+
+"Me? The Old Man wants to see me?"
+
+"Yes," snapped Hupp shortly. Then, in a new tone, "Look here, son.
+If he says--" He stopped, and turned back to his work again.
+
+"If he says what?"
+
+"Nothing. Better run along."
+
+"What's the hurry? I want to tell you about--"
+
+"Better tell him."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Jock stiffly. If that was the way they
+treated a fellow who had turned his first real trick, why, very
+well. He flung out of the little room and made straight for the
+Old Man's office.
+
+Seated at his great flat table desk, Bartholomew Berg did not look
+up as Jock entered. This was characteristic of the Old Man.
+Everything about the chief was deliberate, sure, unhurried. He
+finished the work in hand as though no other person stood there
+waiting his pleasure. When at last he raised his massive head he
+turned his penetrating pale blue eyes full on Jock. Jock was
+conscious of a little tremor running through him. People were apt
+to experience that feeling when that steady, unblinking gaze was
+turned upon them. And yet it was just the clear, unwavering look
+with which Bartholomew Berg, farmer boy, had been wont to gaze out
+across the fresh-plowed fields to the horizon beyond which lay the
+city he dreamed about.
+
+"Tell me your side of it," said Bartholomew Berg tersely.
+
+"All of it?" Jock's confidence was returning.
+
+"Till I stop you."
+
+"Well," began Jock. And standing there at the side of the Old
+Man's desk, his legs wide apart, his face aglow, his hands on his
+hips, he plunged into his tale.
+
+"It started off with a bang from the minute I walked into the
+office of the plant and met Snyder, the advertising manager. We
+shook hands and sparked--just like that." He snapped thumb and
+finger. "What do you think! We belong to the same frat! He's '93.
+Inside of ten minutes he and I were Si-washing around like mad. He
+introduced me to his aunt. I told her who I was, and all that. But
+I didn't start off by talking business. We got along from the
+jump. They both insisted on showing me through the place.
+I--well,"--he laughed a little ruefully,--"there's something
+about being shown through a factory that sort of paralyzes my
+brain. I always feel that I ought to be asking keen, alert,
+intelligent questions like the ones Kipling always asks, or the
+Japs when they're taken through the Stock Yards. But I never can
+think of any. Well, we didn't talk business much. But I could see
+that they were interested. They seemed to,"--he faltered and
+blushed a little,--"to like me, you know. I played golf with
+Snyder that afternoon and he beat me. Won two balls. The next
+morning I found there's been a couple of other advertising men
+there. And while I was talking to Snyder--he was telling me about
+the time he climbed up and muffled the chapel bell--that fellow
+Flynn, of the Dowd Agency, came in. Snyder excused himself, and
+talked to him for--oh, half an hour, perhaps. But that was all. He
+was back again in no time. After that it looked like plain
+sailing. We got along wonderfully. When I left I said, 'I expect
+to know you both better--'"
+
+"I guess," interrupted the Old Man slowly, "that you'll know them
+better all right." He reached out with one broad freckled hand
+and turned back the page of a desk memorandum. "The Athena account
+was given to the Dowd Advertising Agency yesterday."
+
+It took Jock McChesney one minute--one long, sickening minute--to
+grasp the full meaning of it all. He stared at the massive figure
+before him, his mouth ludicrously open, his eyes round, his breath
+for the moment suspended. Then, in a queer husky voice:
+
+"D'you mean--the Dowd--but--they couldn't--"
+
+"I mean," said Bartholomew Berg, "that you've scored what the
+dramatic critics call a personal hit; but that doesn't get the box
+office anything."
+
+"But, Mr. Berg, they said--"
+
+"Sit down a minute, boy." He waved one great heavy hand toward a
+near-by chair. His eyes were not fixed on Jock. They gazed out of
+the window toward the great white tower toward which hundreds of
+thousands of eyes were turned daily--the tower, four-faced but
+faithful.
+
+"McChesney, do you know why you fell down on that Athena account?"
+
+"Because I'm an idiot," blurted Jock. "Because I'm a
+double-barreled, corn-fed, hand-picked chump and--"
+
+"That's one reason," drawled the Old Man grimly. "But it's not the
+chief one. The real reason why you didn't land that account was
+because you're too darned charming."
+
+"Charming!" Jock stared.
+
+"Just that. Personality's one of the biggest factors in business
+to-day. But there are some men who are so likable that it actually
+counts against them. The client he's trying to convince is so
+taken with him that he actually forgets the business he
+represents. We say of a man like that that he is personality plus.
+Personality is like electricity, McChesney. It's got to be tamed
+to be useful."
+
+"But I thought," said Jock, miserably, "that the idea was not to
+talk business all the time."
+
+"You've got it," agreed Berg. "But you must think it all the time.
+Every minute. It's got to be working away in the back of your
+head. You know it isn't always the biggest noise that gets the
+biggest result. The great American hen yields a bigger income than
+the Steel Trust. Look at Miss Galt. When we have a job that needs
+a woman's eye do we send her? No. Why? Because she's too blame
+charming. Too much personality. A man just naturally refuses to
+talk business to a pretty woman unless she's so smart that--"
+
+"My mother," interrupted Jock, suddenly, and then stopped,
+surprised at himself.
+
+"Your mother," said Bartholomew Berg slowly, "is one woman in a
+million. Don't ever forget that. They don't turn out models like
+Emma McChesney more than once every blue moon."
+
+Jock got to his feet slowly. He felt heavy, old. "I suppose," he
+began, "that this ends my--my advertising career."
+
+"Ends it!" The Old Man stood up and put a heavy hand on the boy's
+shoulder. "It only begins it. Unless you want to lie down and
+quit. Do you?"
+
+"Quit!" cried Jock McChesney. "Quit! Not on your white space!"
+
+"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.
+
+  [Illustration: "... 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 attitude with a quiet and deep
+amusement. 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.
+
+  [Illustration: "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
+massage-at-ten-fitting-at-eleven-bridge-at-one women
+always look such hags at thirty-five."
+
+But repetition will ruin the rarest of jokes. As the weeks went on
+and Jock's attitude 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!"
+
+  [Illustration: "'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, Circumstance 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."
+
+"To save Ed Meyers's tender feelings! You don't know him. Fat Ed
+Meyers could be courtmartialed, tried, convicted, and publicly
+disgraced, with his epaulets torn off, and his sword broken, and
+likely as not he'd stoop down, pick up a splinter of steel to use
+as a toothpick, and Castlewalk down the aisle to the tune with
+which they were drumming him out of the regiment. Stay right
+here. Meyers's explanation ought to be at least amusing, if not
+educating."
+
+In the corridor outside could be heard some one blithely humming
+in the throaty tenor of the fat man. The humming ceased with a
+last high note as the door opened and there entered Fat Ed Meyers,
+rosy, cherubic, smiling, his huge frame looming mountainous in the
+rippling folds of a loose-hung London plaid topcoat.
+
+"Greetings!" boomed this cheery vision, raising one hand, palm
+outward, in mystic salute. He beamed upon the frowning Jock.
+"How's the infant prodigy!" The fact that Jock's frown deepened to
+a scowl ruffled him not at all. "And what," went on he, crossing
+his feet and leaning negligently against Mrs. McChesney's desk,
+"and what can I do for thee, fair lady?"
+
+  [Illustration: "'Greetings!'"]
+
+"For me?" said Emma McChesney, looking up at him through narrowed
+eyelids. "I'll tell you what. You can explain to me, in what
+they call a few well-chosen words, just how you, or any other
+living creature, could manage to turn in an expense account like
+that on a six-weeks' missionary trip through the Middle West."
+
+"Dear lady,"--in the bland tones that one uses to an unreasonable
+child,--"you will need no explanation if you will just remember to
+lay the stress on the word missionary. I went forth through the
+Middle West to spread the light among the benighted skirt trade.
+This wasn't a selling trip, dear lady. It was a buying expedition.
+And I had to buy, didn't I? all the way from Michigan to Indiana."
+
+He smiled down at her, calm, self-assured, impudent. A little
+flush grew in Emma McChesney's cheeks.
+
+"I've always said," she began, crisply, "that one could pretty
+well judge a man's character, temperament, morals, and physical
+make-up by just glancing at his expense account. The trouble with
+you is that you haven't learned the art of spending money wisely.
+It isn't always the man with the largest expense sheet that gets
+the most business. And it isn't the man who leaves the greatest
+number of circles on the table top in his hotel room, either."
+She paused a moment. Ed Meyers's smile had lost some of its
+heartiness. "Mr. Buck's out of town, as you know. He'll be back
+next week. He wasn't in favor of--"
+
+"Now, Mrs. McChesney," interrupted Ed Meyers nervously, "you know
+there's always one live one in every firm, just like there's
+always one star in every family. You're the--"
+
+"I'm the one who wants to know how you could spend sixty-nine
+dollars for two days' incidentals in Iowa. Iowa! Why, look here,
+Ed Meyers, I made Iowa for ten years when I was on the road. You
+know that. And you know, and I know, that in order to spend
+sixty-nine dollars for incidentals in two days in Iowa you have to
+call out the militia."
+
+"Not when you're trying to win the love of every skirt buyer from
+Sioux City to Des Moines."
+
+Emma McChesney rose impatiently. "Oh, that's nonsense! You don't
+need to do that these days. Those are old-fashioned methods.
+They're out of date. They--"
+
+At that a little sound came from Jock. Emma heard it, glanced at
+him, turned away again in confusion.
+
+"I was foolish enough in the first place to give you this job for
+old times' sake," she continued hurriedly.
+
+Fat Ed Meyers' face drooped dolefully. He cocked his round head on
+one side fatuously. "For old times' sake," he repeated, with
+tremulous pathos, and heaved a gusty sigh.
+
+"Which goes to show that I need a guardian," finished Emma
+McChesney cruelly. "The only old times that I can remember are
+when I was selling Featherlooms, and you were out for the
+Sans-Silk Skirt Company, both covering the same territory, and
+both running a year-around race to see which could beat the other
+at his own game. The only difference was that I always played
+fair, while you played low-down whenever you had a chance."
+
+"Now, my dear Mrs. McChesney--"
+
+"That'll be all," said Emma McChesney, as one whose patience is
+fast slipping away. "Mr. Buck will see you next week." Then,
+turning to her son as the door closed on the drooping figure of
+the erstwhile buoyant Meyers, "Where'll we lunch, Jock?"
+
+"Mother," Jock broke out hotly, "why in the name of all that's
+foolish do you persist in using the methods of Methuselah! People
+don't sell goods any more by sending out fat old ex-traveling men
+to jolly up the trade."
+
+"Jock," repeated Emma McChesney slowly, "where--shall--we--lunch?"
+
+It was a grim little meal, eaten almost in silence. Emma McChesney
+had made it a rule to use luncheon time as a recess. She played
+mental tag and hop-scotch, so that, returning to her office
+refreshed in mind and body, she could attack the afternoon's work
+with new vigor. And never did she talk or think business.
+
+To-day she ate her luncheon with a forced appetite, glanced about
+with a listlessness far removed from her usual alert interest, and
+followed Jock's attempts at conversation with a polite effort that
+was more insulting than downright inattention.
+
+"Dessert, Mother?" Jock had to say it twice before she heard.
+
+"What? Oh, no--I think not."
+
+The waiter hesitated, coughed discreetly, lifted his eyebrows
+insinuatingly. "The French pastry's particularly nice to-day,
+madam. If you'd care to try something? Eclair, madam--peach
+tart--mocha tart--caramel--"
+
+Emma McChesney smiled. "It does sound tempting." She glanced at
+Jock. "And we're wearing our gowns so floppy this year that it
+makes no difference whether one's fat or not." She turned to the
+waiter. "I never can tell till I see them. Bring your pastry tray,
+will you?"
+
+Jock McChesney's finger and thumb came together with a snap. He
+leaned across the table toward his mother, eyes glowing, lips
+parted and eager. "There! you've proved my point."
+
+"Point?"
+
+"About advertising. No, don't stop me. Don't you see that what
+applies to pastry applies to petticoats? You didn't think of
+French pastry until he suggested it to you--advertised it, really.
+And then you wanted a picture of them. You wanted to know
+what they looked like before buying. That's all there is to
+advertising. Telling people about a thing, making 'em want it, and
+showing 'em how it will look when they have it. Get me?"
+
+Emma McChesney was gazing at Jock with a curious, fascinated
+stare. It was a blank little look, such as we sometimes wear when
+the mind is working furiously. If the insinuating waiter,
+presenting the laden tray for her inspection, was startled by the
+rapt expression which she turned upon the cunningly wrought wares,
+he was too much a waiter to show it.
+
+A pause. "That one," said Mrs. McChesney, pointing to the least
+ornate. She ate it, down to the last crumb, in a silence that was
+pregnant with portent. She put down her fork and sat back.
+
+"Jock, you win. I--I suppose I have fallen out of step. Perhaps
+I've been too busy watching my own feet. T.A. will be back next
+week. Could your office have an advertising plan roughly sketched
+by that time?"
+
+"Could they!" His tone was exultant. "Watch 'em! Hupp's been crazy
+to make Featherlooms famous."
+
+"But look here, son. I want a hand in that copy. I know
+Featherlooms better than your Sam Hupp will ever--"
+
+Jock shook his head. "They won't stand for that, Mother. It never
+works. The manufacturer always thinks he can write magic stuff
+because he knows his own product. But he never can. You see, he
+knows too much. That's it. No perspective."
+
+"We'll see," said Emma McChesney curtly.
+
+So it was that ten days later the first important conference in
+the interests of the Featherloom Petticoat Company's advertising
+campaign was called. But in those ten days of hurried preparation
+a little silent tragedy had come about. For the first time in her
+brave, sunny life Emma McChesney had lost faith in herself. And
+with such malicious humor does Fate work her will that she chose
+Sam Hupp's new dictagraph as the instrument with which to prick
+the bubble of Mrs. McChesney's self-confidence.
+
+Sam Hupp, one of the copy-writing marvels of the Berg, Shriner
+firm, had a trick of forgetting to shut off certain necessary
+currents when he paused in his dictation to throw in
+conversational asides. The old and experienced stenographers, had
+learned to look out for that, and to eliminate from their
+typewritten letters certain irrelevant and sometimes irreverent
+asides which Sam Hupp evidently had addressed to his pipe, or the
+office boy, and not intended for the tube of the all-devouring
+dictagraph.
+
+There was a new and nervous little stenographer in the outer
+office, and she had not been warned of this.
+
+"We think very highly of the plan you suggest," Sam Hupp had said
+into the dictagraph's mouthpiece. "In fact, in one of your
+valuable copy suggestions you--"
+
+Without changing his tone he glanced over his shoulder at his
+colleague, Hopper, who was listening and approving.
+
+"... Let the old girl think the idea is her own. She's virtually
+the head of that concern, and they've spoiled her. Successful, and
+used to being kowtowed to. Doesn't know her notions of copy are
+ten years behind the advertising game--"
+
+And went on with his letter again. After which he left the office
+to play golf. And the little blond numbskull in the outer office
+dutifully took down what the instrument had to say, word for word,
+marked it, "Dictated, but not read," signed neat initials, and
+with a sigh went on with the rest of her sheaf of letters.
+
+Emma McChesney read the letter next morning. She read it down to
+the end, and then again. The two readings were punctuated with a
+little gasp, such as we give when an icy douche is suddenly
+turned upon us. And that was all.
+
+A week later an intent little group formed a ragged circle about
+the big table in the private office of Bartholomew Berg, head of
+the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Bartholomew Berg himself,
+massive, watchful, taciturn, managing to give an impression of
+power by his very silence, sat at one side of the long table. Just
+across from him a sleek-haired stenographer bent over her note
+book, jotting down every word, that the conference might make
+business history. Hopper, at one end of the room, studied his shoe
+heel intently. He was unbelievably boyish looking to command the
+fabulous salary reported to be his. Advertising men, mentioning
+his name, pulled a figurative forelock as they did so. Near Mrs.
+McChesney sat Sam Hupp, he of the lightning brain and the
+sure-fire copy. Emma McChesney, strangely silent, kept her eyes
+intent on the faces of the others. T.A. Buck, interested,
+enthusiastic, but somewhat uncertain, glanced now and then at his
+silent business partner, found no satisfaction in her set face,
+and glanced away again. Grace Galt, unbelievably young and pretty
+to have won a place for herself in that conference of business
+people, smiled in secret at Jock McChesney's evident struggle to
+conceal his elation at being present at this, his first staff
+meeting.
+
+The conference had lasted one hour now. In that time Featherloom
+petticoats had been picked to pieces, bit by bit, from hem to
+waist-band. Nothing had been left untouched. Every angle had come
+under the keen vision of the advertising experts--the comfort of
+the garment, its durability, style, cheapness, service. Which to
+emphasize?
+
+"H--m, novelty campaign, in my opinion," said Hopper, breaking one
+of his long silences. "There's nothing new in petticoats
+themselves, you know. You've got to give 'em a new angle."
+
+"Yep," agreed Hupp. "Start out with a feature skirt. Might
+illustrate with one of those freak drawings they're crazy about
+now--slinky figure, you know, hollow-chested, one foot trailing,
+and all that. They're crazy, but they do attract attention, no
+doubt of that."
+
+Bartholomew Berg turned his head slowly. "What's your opinion,
+Mrs. McChesney?" he asked.
+
+"I--I'm afraid I haven't any," said Emma McChesney listlessly.
+T.A. Buck stared at her in dismay and amazement.
+
+"How about you, Mr. Buck?"
+
+"Why--I--er--of course this advertising game's new to me. I'm
+really leaving it in your hands. I really thought that Mrs.
+McChesney's idea was to make a point of the fact that these
+petticoats were not freak petticoats, but skirts for the everyday
+women. She gave me what I thought was a splendid argument a week
+ago." He turned to her helplessly.
+
+Mrs. McChesney sat silent.
+
+Bartholomew Berg leaned forward a little and smiled one of his
+rare smiles.
+
+"Won't you tell us, Mrs. McChesney? We'd all like to hear what you
+have to say."
+
+Mrs. McChesney looked down at her hands. Then she looked up, and
+addressed what she had to say straight to Bartholomew Berg.
+
+"I--simply didn't want to interfere in this business. I know
+nothing about it, really. Of course, I do know Featherloom
+petticoats. I know all about them. It seemed to me that just
+because the newspapers and magazines were full of pictures showing
+spectacular creatures in impossible attitudes wearing tango tea
+skirts, we are apt to forget that those types form only a thin
+upper crust, and that down beneath there are millions and millions
+of regular, everyday women doing regular everyday things in
+regular everyday clothes. Women who wash on Monday, and iron on
+Tuesday, and bake one-egg cakes, and who have to hurry home to get
+supper when they go down-town in the afternoon. They're the kind
+who go to market every morning, and take the baby along in the
+go-cart, and they're not wearing crêpe de chine tango petticoats
+to do it in, either. They're wearing skirts with a drawstring in
+the back, and a label in the band, guaranteed to last one year.
+Those are the people I'd like to reach, and hold."
+
+"Hm!" said Hopper, from his corner, cryptically.
+
+Bartholomew Berg looked at Emma McChesney admiringly. "Sounds
+reasonable and logical," he said.
+
+Sam Hupp sat up with a jerk.
+
+"It does sound reasonable," he said briskly. "But it isn't. Pardon
+me, won't you, Mrs. McChesney? But you must realize that this is
+an extravagant age. The very workingmen's wives have caught the
+spending fever. The time is past when you can attract people to
+your goods with the promise of durability and wear. They don't
+expect goods to wear. They'd resent it if they did. They get tired
+of an article before it's worn out. They're looking for novelties.
+They'd rather get two months' wear out of a skirt that's slashed a
+new way, than a year's wear out of one that looks like the sort
+that mother used to make."
+
+Mrs. McChesney, her cheeks very pink, her eyes very bright,
+subsided into silence. In silence she sat throughout the rest of
+the conference. In silence she descended in the elevator with T.A.
+Buck, and in silence she stepped into his waiting car.
+
+T.A. Buck eyed her worriedly. "Well?" he said. Then, as Mrs.
+McChesney shrugged noncommittal shoulders, "Tell me, how do you
+feel about it?"
+
+Emma McChesney turned to face him, breathing rather quickly.
+
+"The last time I felt as I do just now was when Jock was a baby.
+He took sick, and the doctors were puzzled. They thought it might
+be something wrong with his spine. They had a consultation--five
+of them--with the poor little chap on the bed, naked. They
+wouldn't let me in, so I listened in the hallway, pressed against
+the door with my face to the crack. They prodded him, and poked
+him, and worked his little legs and arms, and every time he cried
+I prayed, and wept, and clawed the door with my fingers, and
+called them beasts and torturers and begged them to let me in,
+though I wasn't conscious that I was doing those things--at the
+time. I didn't know what they were doing to him, though they said
+it was all for his good, and they were only trying to help him.
+But I only knew that I wanted to rush in, and grab him up in my
+arms, and run away with him--run, and run, and run."
+
+She stopped, lips trembling, eyes suspiciously bright.
+
+"And that's the way I felt in there--this afternoon."
+
+T.A. Buck reached up and patted her shoulder. "Don't, old girl!
+It's going to work out splendidly, I'm sure. After all, those
+chaps do know best."
+
+"They may know best, but they don't know Featherlooms," retorted
+Emma McChesney.
+
+"True. But perhaps what Jock said when he walked with us to the
+elevator was pretty nearly right. You know he said we were
+criticising their copy the way a plumber would criticise the
+Parthenon--so busy finding fault with the lack of drains that we
+failed to see the beauty of the architecture."
+
+"T.A.," said Emma McChesney solemnly, "T.A., we're getting old."
+
+"Old! You! I! Ha!"
+
+"You may 'Ha!' all you like. But do you know what they thought of
+us in there? They thought we were a couple of fogies, and they
+humored us, that's what they did. I'll tell you, T.A., when the
+time comes for me to give Jock up to some little pink-faced girl
+I'll do it, and smile if it kills me. But to hand my Featherlooms
+over to a lot of cold-blooded experts who--well--" she paused,
+biting her lip.
+
+"We'll see, Emma; we'll see."
+
+They did see. The Featherloom petticoat campaign was launched with
+a great splash. It sailed serenely into the sea of national
+business. Then suddenly something seemed to go wrong with its
+engines. It began to wobble and showed a decided list to port.
+Jock, who at the beginning was so puffed with pride that his gold
+fountain pen threatened to burst the confines of his very modishly
+tight vest, lost two degrees of pompousness a day, and his
+attitude toward his unreproachful mother was almost humble.
+
+A dozen times a week T.A. Buck would stroll casually into Mrs.
+McChesney's office. "Think it's going to take hold?" he would ask.
+"Our men say the dealers have laid in, but the public doesn't seem
+to be tearing itself limb from limb to get to our stuff."
+
+Emma McChesney would smile, and shrug noncommittal shoulders.
+
+When it became very painfully apparent that it wasn't "taking
+hold," T.A. Buck, after asking the same question, now worn and
+frayed with asking, broke out, crossly:
+
+"Well, really, I don't mind the shrug, but I do wish you wouldn't
+smile. After all, you know, this campaign is costing us
+money--real money, and large chunks of it. It's very evident that
+we shouldn't have tried to make a national campaign of this
+thing."
+
+Whereupon Mrs. McChesney's smile grew into a laugh. "Forgive me,
+T.A. I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing because--well, I can't
+tell you why. It's a woman's reason, and you wouldn't think it a
+reason at all. For that matter, I suppose it isn't, but--Anyway,
+I've got something to tell you. The fault of this campaign has
+been the copy. It was perfectly good advertising, but it left the
+public cold. When they read those ads they might have been
+impressed with the charm of the garment, but it didn't fill their
+breasts with any wild longing to possess one. It didn't make the
+women feel unhappy until they had one of those skirts hanging on
+the third hook in their closet. The only kind of advertising that
+is advertising is the kind that makes the reader say, 'I'll have
+one of those.'"
+
+T.A. Buck threw out helpless hands. "What are we going to do about
+it?"
+
+"Do? I've already done it."
+
+"Done what?"
+
+"Written the kind of copy that I think Featherlooms ought to have.
+I just took my knowledge of Featherlooms, plus what I knew about
+human nature, sprinkled in a handful of good humor and sincerity,
+and they're going to feed it to the public. It's the same recipe
+that I used to use in selling Featherlooms on the road. It used to
+go by word of mouth. I don't see why it shouldn't go on paper. It
+isn't classic advertising. It isn't scientific. It isn't even what
+they call psychological, I suppose. But it's human. And it's going
+to reach that great, big, solid, safe, spot-cash mass known as the
+middle class. Of course my copy may be wrong. It may not go, after
+all, but--"
+
+But it did go. It didn't go with a rush, or a bang. It went
+slowly, surely, hand over hand, but it went, and it kept on going.
+And watching it climb and take hold there came back to Emma
+McChesney's eye the old sparkle, to her step the old buoyancy, to
+her voice the old delightful ring. And now, when T.A. Buck
+strolled into her office of a morning, with his, "It's taking
+hold, Mrs. Mack," she would dimple like a girl as she laughed back
+at him--
+
+"With a grip that won't let go."
+
+"It looks very much as though we were going to be millionaires in
+our old age, you and I?" went on Buck.
+
+Emma McChesney opened her eyes wide.
+
+"Old!" she mocked, "Old! You! I! Ha!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE MAN WITHIN HIM
+
+
+They used to do it much more picturesquely. They rode in coats of
+scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and
+the baying of hounds, to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle
+of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing
+through forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling
+up the inclines, pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until,
+panting, wide-eyed, eager, blood-hungry, the hunt closed in at the
+death.
+
+The scarlet coat has sobered down to the somber gray and the
+snuffy brown of that unromantic garment known as the business
+suit. The winding horn is become a goblet, and its notes are the
+tinkle of ice against glass. The baying of hounds has harshened to
+the squawk of the motor siren. The fresh-plowed field is a blue
+print, the forest maze a roll of plans and specifications. Each
+fence is a business barrier. Every ditch is of a competitor's
+making, dug craftily so that the clumsy-footed may come a cropper.
+All the romance is out of it, all the color, all the joy. But two
+things remain the same: The look in the face of the hunter as he
+closed in on the fox is the look in the face of him who sees the
+coveted contract lying ready for the finishing stroke of his pen.
+And his words are those of the hunter of long ago as, eyes
+a-gleam, teeth bared, muscles still taut with the tenseness of the
+chase, he waves the paper high in air and cries, "I've made a
+killing!"
+
+For two years Jock McChesney had watched the field as it swept by
+in its patient, devious, cruel game of Hunt the Contract. But he
+had never been in at the death. Those two years had taught him how
+to ride; to take a fence; to leap a ditch. He had had his awkward
+bumps, and his clumsy falls. He had lost his way more than once.
+But he had always groped his way back again, stumblingly, through
+the dusk. Jock McChesney was the youngest man on the Berg, Shriner
+Advertising Company's big staff of surprisingly young men. So
+young that the casual glance did not reveal to you the marks that
+the strain of those two years had left on his boyish face. But the
+marks were there.
+
+Nature etches with the most delicate of points. She knows the
+cunning secret of light and shadow. You scarcely realize that she
+has been at work. A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at
+the corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the
+nostrils--and the thing is done.
+
+Even Emma McChesney's eyes--those mother-eyes which make the lynx
+seem a mole--had failed to note the subtle change. Then, suddenly,
+one night, the lines leaped out at her.
+
+They were seated at opposite sides of the book-littered library
+table in the living-room of the cheerful up-town apartment which
+was the realization of the nightly dream which Mrs. Emma McChesney
+had had in her ten years on the road for the T.A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company. Jock McChesney's side of the big table was
+completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches,
+photographs and drawings which make up an advertising lay-out. He
+was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on
+the table. Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as
+Jock bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered
+away. The lamplight fell full on his face. And Emma McChesney saw.
+The hand that held the magazine fell to her lap. Her lips were
+parted slightly. She sat very quietly, her eyes never leaving the
+face that frowned so intently over the littered table. The room
+had been very quiet before--Jock busy with his work, his mother
+interested in her magazine. But this silence was different. There
+was something electric in it. It was a silence that beats on the
+brain like a noise. Jock McChesney, bent over his work, heard it,
+felt it, and, oppressed by it, looked up suddenly. He met those
+two eyes opposite.
+
+"Spooks? Or is it my godlike beauty which holds you thus? Or is my
+face dirty?"
+
+Emma McChesney did not smile. She laid her magazine on the table,
+face down, and leaned forward, her staring eyes still fixed on her
+son's face.
+
+"Look here, young 'un. Are you working too hard?"
+
+"Me? Now? This stuff you mean--?"
+
+"No; I mean in the last year. Are they piling it up on you?"
+
+Jock laughed a laugh that was nothing less than a failure, so
+little of real mirth did it contain.
+
+"Piling it up! Lord, no! I wish they would. That's the trouble.
+They don't give me a chance."
+
+"A chance! Why, that's not true, son. You've said yourself that
+there are men who have been in the office three times as long as
+you have, who never have had the opportunities that they've given
+you."
+
+It was as though she had touched a current that thrilled him to
+action. He pushed back his chair and stood up, one hand thrust
+into his pocket, the other passing quickly over his head from brow
+to nape with a quick, nervous gesture that was new to him.
+
+"And why!" he flung out. "Why! Not because they like the way I
+part my hair. They don't do business that way up there. It's
+because I've made good, and those other dubs haven't. That's why.
+They've let me sit in at the game. But they won't let me take any
+tricks. I've been an apprentice hand for two years now. I'm tired
+of it. I want to be in on a killing. I want to taste blood. I want
+a chance at some of the money--real money."
+
+Emma McChesney sat back in her chair and surveyed the angry figure
+before her with quiet, steady eyes.
+
+"I might have known that only one thing could bring those lines
+into your face, son." She paused a moment. "So you want money as
+badly as all that, do you?"
+
+Jock's hand came down with a thwack on the papers before him.
+
+"Want it! You just bet I want it."
+
+"Do I know her?" asked Emma McChesney quietly.
+
+Jock stopped short in his excited pacing up and down the room.
+
+"Do you know--Why, I didn't say there--What makes you think
+that--?"
+
+"When a youngster like you, whose greatest worry has been whether
+Harvard'll hold 'em again this year, with Baxter out, begins to
+howl about not being appreciated in business, and to wear a late
+fall line of wrinkles where he has been smooth before, I feel
+justified in saying, 'Do I know her?'"
+
+"Well, it isn't any one--at least, it isn't what you mean you
+think it is when you say you--"
+
+"Careful there! You'll trip. Never you mind what I mean I think it
+is when I say. Count ten, and then just tell me what you think you
+mean."
+
+Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little
+gesture. Then he sat down, a little wearily. He stared moodily
+down at the pile of papers before him: His mother faced him
+quietly across the table.
+
+"Grace Galt's getting twice as much as I am," Jock broke out, with
+savage suddenness. "The first year I didn't mind. A fellow gets
+accustomed, these days, to see women breaking into all the
+professions and getting away with men-size salaries. But her pay
+check doubles mine--more than doubles it."
+
+"It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a
+firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means
+she's worth six times as much."
+
+A painful red crept into Jock's face. "Maybe. Two years ago that
+would have sounded reasonable to me. Two years ago, when I walked
+down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty-second
+was just an electric sign to me. Just part of the town's
+decoration like the chorus girls, and the midnight theater crowds.
+Now--well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is
+crammed full of meaning. I know the power that advertising has;
+how it influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and
+our health. It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear,
+and the books we read, and the entertainment we seek. It's
+colossal, that's what it is! It's--"
+
+"Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no business
+banquet will be complete without you. The next thing you know
+you'll be addressing the Y.M.C.A. advertising classes on The Young
+Man in Business."
+
+Jock laughed a rueful little laugh. "I didn't mean to make
+a speech. I was just trying to say that I've served my
+apprenticeship. It hurts a fellow's pride. You can't hold your
+head up before a girl when you know her salary's twice yours, and
+you know that she knows it. Why look at Mrs. Hoffman, who's with
+the Dowd Agency. Of course she's a wonder, even if her face does
+look like the fifty-eighth variety. She can write copy that lifts
+a campaign right out of the humdrum class, and makes it luminous.
+Her husband works in a bank somewhere. He earns about as much as
+Mrs. Hoffman pays the least of her department subordinates. And
+he's so subdued that he side-steps when he walks, and they call
+him the human jelly-fish."
+
+Emma McChesney was regarding her son with a little puzzled frown.
+Suddenly she reached out and tapped the topmost of the scribbled
+sheets strewn the length of Jock's side of the table.
+
+"What's all this?"
+
+Jock tipped back his chair and surveyed the clutter before him.
+
+"That," said he, "is what is known on the stage as 'the papers.'
+And it's the real plot of this piece."
+
+"M-m-m--I thought so. Just favor me with a scenario, will you?"
+
+Half-grinning, half-serious, Jock stuck his thumbs in the armholes
+of his waistcoat, and began.
+
+"Scene: Offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Time,
+the present. Characters: Jock McChesney, handsome, daring,
+brilliant--"
+
+"Suppose you--er--skip the characters, however fascinating, and
+get to the action."
+
+Jock McChesney brought the tipped chair down on all-fours with a
+thud, and stood up. The grin was gone. He was as serious as he had
+been in the midst of his tirade of five minutes before.
+
+"All right. Here it is. And don't blame me if it sounds like cheap
+melodrama. This stuff," and he waved a hand toward the paper-laden
+table, "is an advertising campaign plan for the Griebler Gum
+Company, of St. Louis. Oh, don't look impressed. The office hasn't
+handed me any such commission. I just got the idea like a flash,
+and I've been working it out for the last two weeks. It worked
+itself out, almost--the way a really scorching idea does,
+sometimes. This Griebler has been advertising for years. You
+know the Griebler gum. But it hasn't been the right sort of
+advertising. Old Griebler, the original gum man, had fogy notions
+about advertising, and as long as he lived they had to keep it
+down. He died a few months ago--you must have read of it. Left a
+regular mint. Ben Griebler, the oldest son, started right in to
+clean out the cobwebs. Of course the advertising end of it has
+come in for its share of the soap and water. He wants to make a
+clean sweep of it. Every advertising firm in the country has been
+angling for the contract. It's going to be a real one. Two-thirds
+of the crowd have submitted plans. And that's just where my kick
+comes in. The Berg, Shriner Company makes it a rule never to
+submit advance plans."
+
+"Excuse me if I seem a trifle rude," interrupted Mrs. McChesney,
+"but I'd like to know where you think you've been wronged in
+this."
+
+"Right here!" replied Jock, and he slapped his pocket, "and here,"
+he pointed to his head. "Two spots so vital that they make old
+Achilles's heel seem armor-plated. Ben Griebler is one of the
+show-me kind. He wants value received for money expended, and
+while everybody knows that he has a loving eye on the Berg,
+Shriner crowd, he won't sign a thing until he knows what he's
+getting. A firm's record, standing, staff, equipment, mean nothing
+to him."
+
+"But, Jock, I still don't see--"
+
+Jock gathered up a sheaf of loose papers and brandished them in
+the air. "This is where I come in. I've got a plan here that will
+fetch this Griebler person. Oh, I'm not dreaming. I outlined it
+for Sam Hupp, and he was crazy about it. Sam Hupp had some sort of
+plan outlined himself. But he said this made his sound as dry as
+cigars in Denver. And you know yourself that Sam Hupp's copy is so
+brilliant that he could sell brewery advertising to a temperance
+magazine."
+
+Emma McChesney stood up. She looked a little impatient, and a
+trifle puzzled. "But why all this talk! I don't get you. Take your
+plan to Mr. Berg. If it's what you think it is he'll see it
+quicker than any other human being, and he'll probably fall on
+your neck and invest you in royal robes and give you a mahogany
+desk all your own."
+
+"Oh, what's the good!" retorted Jock disgustedly. "This Griebler
+has an appointment at the office to-morrow. He'll be closeted with
+the Old Man. They'll call in Hupp. But never a plan will they
+reveal. It's against their code of ethics. Ethics! I'm sick of the
+word. I suppose you'd say I'm lucky to be associated with a firm
+like that, and I suppose I am. But I wish in the name of all the
+gods of Business that they weren't so bloomin' conservative.
+Ethics! They're all balled up in 'em, like Henry James in his
+style."
+
+Emma McChesney came over from her side of the table and stood very
+close to her son. She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and
+looked up into the sullen, angry young face.
+
+  [Illustration: "She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and
+  looked up into the sullen, angry young face"]
+
+"I've seen older men than you are, Jock, and better men, and
+bigger men, wearing that same look, and for the same reason. Every
+ambitious man or woman in business wears it at one time or
+another. Sooner or later, Jock, you'll have your chance at the
+money end of this game. If you don't care about the thing you call
+ethics, it'll be sooner. If you do care, it will be later. It
+rests with you, but it's bound to come, because you've got the
+stuff in you."
+
+"Maybe," replied Jock the cynical. But his face lost some of its
+sullenness as he looked down at that earnest, vivid countenance
+up-turned to his. "Maybe. It sounds all right, Mother--in the
+story books. But I'm not quite solid on it. These days it isn't
+so much what you've got in you that counts as what you can bring
+out. I know the young man's slogan used to be 'Work and Wait,' or
+something pretty like that. But these days they've boiled it down
+to one word--'Produce'!"
+
+"The marvel of it is that there aren't more of 'em," observed Emma
+McChesney sadly.
+
+"More what?"
+
+"More lines. Here,"--she touched his forehead,--"and here,"--she
+touched his eyes.
+
+"Lines!" Jock swung to face a mirror. "Good! I'm so infernally
+young-looking that no one takes me seriously. It's darned hard
+trying to convince people you're a captain of finance when you
+look like an errand boy."
+
+From the center of the room Mrs. McChesney watched the boy as he
+surveyed himself in the glass. And as she gazed there came a
+frightened look into her eyes. It was gone in a minute, and in its
+place came a curious little gleam, half amused, half pugnacious.
+
+"Jock McChesney, if I thought that you meant half of what you've
+said to-night about honor, and ethics, and all that, I'd--"
+
+"Spank me, I suppose," said the young six-footer.
+
+"No," and all the humor had fled, "I--Jock, I've never said much
+to you about your father. But I think you know that he was what he
+was to the day of his death. You were just about eight when I made
+up my mind that life with him was impossible. I said then--and you
+were all I had, son--that I'd rather see you dead than to have you
+turn out to be a son of your father. Don't make me remember that
+wish, Jock."
+
+Two quick steps and his arms were about her. His face was all
+contrition. "Why--Mother! I didn't mean--You see this is business,
+and I'm crazy to make good, and it's such a fight--"
+
+"Don't I know it?" demanded Emma McChesney. "I guess your mother
+hasn't been sitting home embroidering lunchcloths these last
+fifteen years." She lifted her head from the boy's shoulder. "And
+now, son, considering me, not as your doting mother, but in my
+business capacity as secretary of the T.A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company, suppose you reveal to me the inner workings of
+this plan of yours. I'd like to know if you really are the
+advertising wizard that you think you are."
+
+So it was that long after Annie's dinner dishes had ceased to
+clatter in the kitchen; long after she had put her head in at the
+door to ask, "Aigs 'r cakes for breakfast?" long after those two
+busy brains should have rested in sleep, the two sat at either
+side of the light-flooded table, the face of one glowing as he
+talked, the face of the other sparkling as she listened. And at
+midnight:
+
+"Why, you infant wonder!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.
+
+At nine o'clock next morning when Jock McChesney entered the
+offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company he carried a
+flat, compact bundle of papers under his arm encased in protecting
+covers of pasteboard, and further secured by bands of elastic.
+This he carried to his desk, deposited in a drawer, and locked the
+drawer.
+
+By eleven o'clock the things which he had predicted the night
+before had come to pass. A plump little man, with a fussy manner
+and Western clothes had been ushered into Bartholomew Berg's
+private office. Instinct told him that this was Griebler. Jock
+left his desk and strolled up to get the switchboard operator's
+confirmation of his guess. Half an hour later Sam Hupp hustled by
+and disappeared into the Old Man's sanctum.
+
+Jock fingered the upper left-hand drawer of his desk. The
+maddening blankness of that closed door! If only he could find
+some excuse for walking into that room--any old excuse, no matter
+how wild!--just to get a chance at it--
+
+His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, his eye on the
+closed door, his thoughts inside that room.
+
+"Mr. Berg wants to see you right away," came the voice of the
+switchboard operator.
+
+Something seemed to give way inside--something in the region of
+his brain--no, his heart--no, his lungs--
+
+"Well, can you beat that!" said Jock McChesney aloud, in a kind of
+trance of joy. "Can--you--beat--that!"
+
+Then he buttoned the lower button of his coat, shrugged his
+shoulders with an extra wriggle at the collar (the modern hero's
+method of girding up his loins), and walked calmly into
+Bartholomew Berg's very private office.
+
+In the second that elapsed between the opening and the closing of
+the door Jock's glance swept the three men--Bartholomew Berg,
+quiet, inscrutable, seated at his great table-desk; Griebler, lost
+in the depths of a great leather chair, smoking fussily and
+twitching with a hundred little restless, irritating gestures; Sam
+Hupp, standing at the opposite side of the room, hands in pockets,
+attitude argumentative.
+
+"This is Mr. McChesney," said Bartholomew Berg. "Mr. Griebler,
+McChesney."
+
+Jock came forward, smiling that charming smile of his. "Mr.
+Griebler," he said, extending his hand, "this is a great
+pleasure."
+
+"Hm!" growled Ben Griebler, "I didn't know they picked 'em so
+young."
+
+His voice was a piping falsetto that somehow seemed to match his
+restless little eyes.
+
+Jock thrust his hands hurriedly into his pockets. He felt his face
+getting scarlet.
+
+"They're--ah--using 'em young this year," said Bartholomew Berg.
+His voice sounded bigger, and smoother, and pleasanter than ever
+in contrast with that other's shrill tone. "I prefer 'em young,
+myself. You'll never catch McChesney using 'in the last analysis'
+to drive home an argument. He has a new idea about every nineteen
+minutes, and every other one's a good one, and every nineteenth
+or so's an inspiration." The Old Man laughed one of his low,
+chuckling laughs.
+
+"Hm--that so?" piped Ben Griebler. "Up in my neck of the woods we
+aren't so long on inspiration. We're just working men, and we wear
+working clothes--"
+
+"Oh, now," protested Berg, his eyes twinkling, "McChesney's
+necktie and socks and handkerchief may form one lovely, blissful
+color scheme, but that doesn't signify that his advertising
+schemes are not just as carefully and artistically blended."
+
+Ben Griebler looked shrewdly up at Jock through narrowed lids.
+"Maybe. I'll talk to you in a minute, young man--that is--" he
+turned quickly upon Berg--"if that isn't against your crazy
+principles, too?"
+
+"Why, not at all," Bartholomew Berg assured him. "Not at all. You
+do me an injustice."
+
+Griebler moved up closer to the broad table. The two fell into a
+low-voiced talk. Jock looked rather helplessly around at Sam Hupp.
+That alert gentleman was signaling him frantically with head and
+wagging finger. Jock crossed the big room to Hupp's side. The two
+moved off to a window at the far end.
+
+"Give heed to your Unkie," said Sam Hupp, talking very rapidly,
+very softly, and out of one corner of his mouth. "This Griebler's
+looking for an advertising manager. He's as pig-headed as
+a--a--well, as a pig, I suppose. But it's a corking chance,
+youngster, and the Old Man's just recommended you--strong. Now--"
+
+"Me--!" exploded Jock.
+
+"Shut up!" hissed Hupp. "Two or three years with that firm would
+be the making of you--if you made good, of course. And you could.
+They want to move their factory here from St. Louis within the
+next few years. Now listen. When he talks to you, you play up the
+keen, alert stuff with a dash of sophistication, see? If you can
+keep your mouth shut and throw a kind of a canny, I-get-you, look
+into your eyes, all the better. He's gabby enough for two. Try a
+line of talk that is filled with the fire and enthusiasm of
+youth, combined with the good judgment and experience of middle
+age, and you've--"
+
+"Say, look here," stammered Jock. "Even if I was Warfield enough
+to do all that, d'you honestly think--me an advertising
+manager!--with a salary that Griebler--"
+
+"You nervy little shrimp, go in and win. He'll pay five thousand
+if he pays a cent. But he wants value for money expended. Now I've
+tipped you off. You make your killing--"
+
+"Oh, McChesney!" called Bartholomew Berg, glancing round.
+
+"Yes, sir!" said Jock, and stood before him in the same moment.
+
+"Mr. Griebler is looking for a competent, enthusiastic,
+hard-working man as advertising manager. I've spoken to him of
+you. I know what you can do. Mr. Griebler might trust my judgment
+in this, but--"
+
+"I'll trust my own judgment," snapped Ben Griebler. "It's good
+enough for me."
+
+"Very well," returned Bartholomew Berg suavely. "And if you decide
+to place your advertising future in the hands of the Berg, Shriner
+Company--"
+
+"Now look here," interrupted Ben Griebler again. "I'll tie up
+with you people when you've shaken something out of your cuffs.
+I'm not the kind that buys a pig in a poke. We're going to spend
+money--real money--in this campaign of ours. But I'm not such a
+come-on as to hand you half a million or so and get a promise in
+return. I want your plans, and I want 'em in full."
+
+A little exclamation broke from Sam Hupp. He checked it, but not
+before Berg's curiously penetrating pale blue eyes had glanced up
+at him, and away again.
+
+"I've told you, Mr. Griebler," went on Bartholomew Berg's patient
+voice, "just why the thing you insist on is impossible. This firm
+does not submit advance copy. Every business commission that comes
+to us is given all the skill, and thought, and enthusiasm, and
+careful planning that this office is capable of. You know our
+record. This is a business of ideas. And ideas are too precious,
+too perishable, to spread in the market place for all to see."
+
+Ben Griebler stood up. His cigar waggled furiously between his
+lips as he talked.
+
+"I know something else that don't stand spreading in the market
+place, Berg. And that's money. It's too darned perishable, too."
+He pointed a stubby finger at Jock. "Does this fool rule of yours
+apply to this young fellow, too?"
+
+Bartholomew Berg seemed to grow more patient, more self-contained
+as the other man's self-control slipped rapidly away.
+
+"It goes for every man and woman in this office, Mr. Griebler.
+This young chap, McChesney here, might spend weeks and months
+building up a comprehensive advertising plan for you. He'd spend
+those weeks studying your business from every possible angle.
+Perhaps it would be a plan that would require a year of waiting
+before the actual advertising began to appear. And then you might
+lose faith in the plan. A waiting game is a hard game to play.
+Some other man's idea, that promised quicker action, might appeal
+to you. And when it appeared we'd very likely find our own
+original idea incorporated in--"
+
+"Say, look here!" squeaked Ben Griebler, his face dully red.
+"D'you mean to imply that I'd steal your plan! D'you mean to sit
+there and tell me to my face--"
+
+"Mr. Griebler, I mean that that thing happens constantly in this
+business. We're almost powerless to stop it. Nothing spreads
+quicker than a new idea. Compared to it a woman's secret is a
+sealed book."
+
+Ben Griebler removed the cigar from his lips. He was stuttering
+with anger. With a mingling of despair and boldness Jock saw the
+advantage of that stuttering moment and seized on it. He stepped
+close to the broad table-desk, resting both hands on it and
+leaning forward slightly in his eagerness.
+
+"Mr. Berg--I have a plan. Mr. Hupp can tell you. It came to me
+when I first heard that the Grieblers were going to broaden out.
+It's a real idea. I'm sure of that. I've worked it out in detail.
+Mr. Hupp himself said it--Why, I've got the actual copy. And it's
+new. Absolutely. It never--"
+
+"Trot it out!" shouted Ben Griebler. "I'd like to see one idea
+anyway, around this shop."
+
+"McChesney," said Bartholomew Berg, not raising his voice. His
+eyes rested on Jock with the steady, penetrating gaze that was
+peculiar to him. More foolhardy men than Jock McChesney had
+faltered and paused, abashed, under those eyes. "McChesney, your
+enthusiasm for your work is causing you to forget one thing that
+must never be forgotten in this office."
+
+Jock stepped back. His lower lip was caught between his teeth. At
+the same moment Ben Griebler snatched up his hat from the table,
+clapped it on his head at an absurd angle and, bristling like a
+fighting cock, confronted the three men.
+
+"I've got a couple of rules myself," he cried, "and don't you
+forget it. When you get a little spare time, you look up St. Louis
+and find out what state it's in. The slogan of that state is my
+slogan, you bet. If you think I'm going to make you a present of
+the money that it took my old man fifty years to pile up, then you
+don't know that Griebler is a German name. Good day, gents."
+
+He stalked to the door. There he turned dramatically and leveled a
+forefinger at Jock. "They've got you roped and tied. But I think
+you're a comer. If you change your mind, kid, come and see me."
+
+The door slammed behind him.
+
+"Whew!" whistled Sam Hupp, passing a handkerchief over his bald
+spot.
+
+Bartholomew Berg reached out with one great capable hand and swept
+toward him a pile of papers. "Oh, well, you can't blame him.
+Advertising has been a scream for so long. Griebler doesn't know
+the difference between advertising, publicity, and bunk. He'll
+learn. But it'll be an awfully expensive course. Now, Hupp, let's
+go over this Kalamazoo account. That'll be all, McChesney."
+
+Jock turned without a word. He walked quickly through the outer
+office, into the great main room. There he stopped at the
+switchboard.
+
+"Er--Miss Grimes," he said, smiling charmingly. "Where's this Mr.
+Griebler, of St. Louis, stopping; do you know?"
+
+"Say, where would he stop?" retorted the wise Miss Grimes. "Look
+at him! The Waldorf, of course."
+
+"Thanks," said Jock, still smiling. And went back to his desk.
+
+At five Jock left the office. Under his arm he carried the flat
+pasteboard package secured by elastic bands. At five-fifteen he
+walked swiftly down the famous corridor of the great red stone
+hotel. The colorful glittering crowd that surged all about him he
+seemed not to see. He made straight for the main desk with its
+battalion of clerks.
+
+  [Illustration: "He made straight for the main desk with its
+  battalion of clerks"]
+
+"Mr. Griebler in? Mr. Ben Griebler, St. Louis?"
+
+The question set in motion the hotel's elaborate system of
+investigation. At last: "Not in."
+
+"Do you know when he will be in?" That futile question.
+
+"Can't say. He left no word. Do you want to leave your name?"
+
+"N-no. Would he--does he stop at this desk when he comes in?"
+
+He was an unusually urbane hotel clerk. "Why, usually they leave
+their keys and get their mail from the floor clerk. But Mr.
+Griebler seems to prefer the main desk."
+
+"I'll--wait," said Jock. And seated in one of the great thronelike
+chairs, he waited. He sat there, slim and boyish, while the
+laughing, chattering crowd swept all about him. If you sit long
+enough in that foyer you will learn all there is to learn about
+life. An amazing sight it is--that crowd. Baraboo helps swell it,
+and Spokane, and Berlin, and Budapest, and Pekin, and Paris, and
+Waco, Texas. So varied it is, so cosmopolitan, that if you sit
+there patiently enough, and watch sharply enough you will even see
+a chance New Yorker.
+
+From door to desk Jock's eyes swept. The afternoon-tea crowd, in
+paradise feathers, and furs, and frock coats swam back and forth.
+He saw it give way to the dinner throng, satin-shod, bejeweled,
+hurrying through its oysters, swallowing unbelievable numbers of
+cloudy-amber drinks, and golden-brown drinks, and maroon drinks,
+then gathering up its furs and rushing theaterwards. He was still
+sitting there when that crowd, its eight o'clock freshness
+somewhat sullied, its sparkle a trifle dimmed, swept back for more
+oysters, more cloudy-amber and golden-brown drinks.
+
+At half-hour intervals, then at hourly intervals, the figure in
+the great chair stirred, rose, and walked to the desk.
+
+"Has Mr. Griebler come in?"
+
+The supper throng, its laugh a little ribald, its talk a shade
+high-pitched, drifted towards the street, or was wafted up in
+elevators. The throng thinned to an occasional group. Then these
+became rarer and rarer. The revolving door admitted one man, or
+two, perhaps, who lingered not at all in the unaccustomed quiet of
+the great glittering lobby.
+
+The figure of the watcher took on a pathetic droop. The eyelids
+grew leaden. To open them meant an almost superhuman effort. The
+stare of the new night clerks grew more and more hostile and
+suspicious. A grayish pallor had settled down on the boy's face.
+And those lines of the night before stood out for all to see.
+
+In the stillness of the place the big revolving door turned once
+more, complainingly. For the thousandth time Jock's eyes
+lifted heavily. Then they flew wide open. The drooping figure
+straightened electrically. Half a dozen quick steps and Jock stood
+in the pathway of Ben Griebler who, rather ruffled and untidy, had
+blown in on the wings of the morning.
+
+He stared a moment. "Well, what--"
+
+"I've been waiting for you here since five o'clock last evening.
+It will soon be five o'clock again. Will you let me show you those
+plans now?"
+
+Ben Griebler had surveyed Jock with the stony calm of the
+out-of-town visitor who is prepared to show surprise at nothing in
+New York.
+
+"There's nothing like getting an early start," said Ben Griebler.
+"Come on up to my room." Key in hand, he made for the elevator.
+For an almost imperceptible moment Jock paused. Then, with a
+little rush, he followed the short, thick-set figure. "I knew you
+had it in you, McChesney. I said you looked like a comer, didn't
+I?"
+
+Jock said nothing. He was silent while Griebler unlocked his door,
+turned on the light, fumbled at the windows and shades, picked up
+the telephone receiver. "What'll you have?"
+
+"Nothing." Jock had cleared the center table and was opening his
+flat bundle of papers. He drew up two chairs. "Let's not waste any
+time," he said. "I've had a twelve-hour wait for this." He seemed
+to control the situation. Obediently Ben Griebler hung up the
+receiver, came over, and took the chair very close to Jock.
+
+  [Illustration: "'Let's not waste any time,' he said"]
+
+"There's nothing artistic about gum," began Jock McChesney; and
+his manner was that of a man who is sure of himself. "It's a
+shirt-sleeve product, and it ought to be handled from a
+shirt-sleeve standpoint. Every gum concern in the country has
+spent thousands on a 'better-than-candy' campaign before it
+realized that gum is a candy and drug store article, and that no
+man is going to push a five-cent package of gum at the sacrifice
+of the sale of an eighty-cent box of candy. But the health note is
+there, if only you strike it right. Now, here's my idea--"
+
+At six o'clock Ben Griebler, his little shrewd eyes sparkling, his
+voice more squeakily falsetto than ever, surveyed the youngster
+before him with a certain awe.
+
+"This--this thing will actually sell our stuff in Europe! No gum
+concern has ever been able to make the stuff go outside of this
+country. Why, inside of three years every 'Arry and 'Arriet in
+England'll be chewing it on bank holidays. I don't know about
+Germany, but--" He pushed back his chair and got up. "Well, I'm
+solid on that. And what I say goes. Now I'll tell you what I'll
+do, kid. I'll take you down to St. Louis with me, at a figure
+that'll make your--"
+
+Jock looked up.
+
+"Or if you don't want the Berg, Shriner crowd to get wise, I'll
+fix it this way. I'll go over there this morning and tell 'em I've
+changed my mind, see? The campaign's theirs, see? Then I refuse
+to consider any of their suggestions until I see your plan. And
+when I see it I fall for it like a ton of bricks. Old Berg'll
+never know. He's so darned high-principled--"
+
+Jock McChesney stood up. The little drawn pinched look which had
+made his face so queerly old was gone. His eyes were bright. His
+face was flushed.
+
+"There! You've said it. I didn't realize how raw this deal was
+until you put it into words for me. I want to thank you. You're
+right. Bartholomew Berg is so darned high-principled that two
+muckers like you and me, groveling around in the dirt, can't even
+see the tips of the heights to which his ideals have soared. Don't
+stop me. I know I'm talking like a book. But I feel like something
+that has just been kicked out into the sunshine after having been
+in jail."
+
+"You're tired," said Ben Griebler. "It's been a strain. Something
+always snaps after a long tension."
+
+Jock's flat palm came down among the papers with a crack.
+
+"You bet something snaps! It has just snapped inside me." He
+began quietly to gather up the papers in an orderly little way.
+
+"What's that for?" inquired Griebler, coming forward. "You don't
+mean--"
+
+"I mean that I'm going to go home and square this thing with a
+lady you've never met. You and she wouldn't get on if you did. You
+don't talk the same language. Then I'm going to have a cold bath,
+and a hot breakfast. And then, Griebler, I'm going to take this
+stuff to Bartholomew Berg and tell him the whole nasty business.
+He'll see the humor of it. But I don't know whether he'll fire me,
+or make me vice-president of the company. Now, if you want to come
+over and talk to him, fair and square, why come."
+
+"Ten to one he fires you," remarked Griebler, as Jock reached the
+door.
+
+"There's only one person I know who's game enough to take you up
+on that. And it's going to take more nerve to face her at
+six-thirty than it will to tackle a whole battalion of Bartholomew
+Bergs at nine."
+
+"Well, I guess I can get in a three-hour sleep before--er--"
+
+"Before what?" said Jock McChesney from the door.
+
+Ben Griebler laughed a little shamefaced laugh. "Before I see you
+at ten, sonny."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE SELF-STARTER
+
+
+There is nothing in the sound of the shrill little bell to warn us
+of the import of its message. More's the pity. It may be that bore
+whose telephone conversation begins: "Well, what do you know
+to-day?" It may be your lawyer to say you've inherited a million.
+Hence the arrogance of the instrument. It knows its voice will
+never wilfully go unanswered so long as the element of chance lies
+concealed within it.
+
+Mrs. Emma McChesney heard the call of her telephone across the
+hall. Seated in the office of her business partner, T.A. Buck, she
+was fathoms deep in discussion of the T.A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company's new spring line. The buzzer's insistent
+voice brought her to her feet, even while she frowned at the
+interruption.
+
+"That'll be Baumgartner 'phoning about those silk swatches. Back
+in a minute," said Emma McChesney and hurried across the hall just
+in time to break the second call.
+
+The perfunctory "Hello! Yes" was followed by a swift change of
+countenance, a surprised little cry, then,--in quite another
+tone--"Oh, it's you, Jock! I wasn't expecting ... No, not too
+busy to talk to you, you young chump! Go on." A moment of silence,
+while Mrs. McChesney's face smiled and glowed like a girl's as she
+listened to the voice of her son. Then suddenly glow and smile
+faded. She grew tense. Her head, that had been leaning so
+carelessly on the hand that held the receiver, came up with a
+jerk. "Jock McChesney!" she gasped, "you--why, you don't mean!--"
+
+Now, Emma McChesney was not a woman given to jerky conversations,
+interspersed with exclamation points. Her poise and balance had
+become a proverb in the business world. Yet her lips were
+trembling now. Her eyes were very round and bright. Her face had
+flushed, then grown white. Her voice shook a little. "Yes, of
+course I am. Only, I'm so surprised. Yes, I'll be home early.
+Five-thirty at the latest."
+
+She hung up the receiver with a little fumbling gesture. Her hand
+dropped to her lap, then came up to her throat a moment, dropped
+again. She sat staring straight ahead with eyes that saw one
+thousand miles away.
+
+From his office across the hall T.A. Buck strolled in casually.
+
+"Did Baumgartner say he'd--?" He stopped as Mrs. McChesney looked
+up at him. A quick step forward--"What's the matter, Emma?"
+
+"Jock--Jock--"
+
+"Jock! What's happened to the boy?" Then, as she still stared at
+him, her face pitiful, his hand patted her shoulder. "Dear girl,
+tell me." He bent over her, all solicitude.
+
+"Don't!" said Emma McChesney faintly, and shook off his hand.
+"Your stenographer can see--What will the office think? Please--"
+
+"Oh, darn the stenographer! What's this bad news of Jock?"
+
+Emma McChesney sat up. She smiled a little nervously and passed
+her handkerchief across her lips. "I didn't say it was bad, did I?
+That is, not exactly bad, I suppose."
+
+T.A. Buck ran a frenzied hand over his head. "My dear child,"
+with careful politeness, "will you please try to be sane? I find
+you sitting at your desk, staring into space, your face white as a
+ghost's, your whole appearance that of a person who has received a
+death-blow. And then you say, 'Not exactly bad'!"
+
+"It's this," explained Emma McChesney in a hollow tone: "The Berg,
+Shriner Advertising Company has appointed Jock manager of their
+new Western branch. They're opening offices in Chicago in March."
+Her lower lip quivered. She caught it sharply between her teeth.
+
+For one surprised moment T.A. Buck stared in silence. Then a roar
+broke from him. "Not exactly bad!" he boomed between laughs. "Not
+exactly b--Not ex_act_ly, eh?" Then he was off again.
+
+Mrs. McChesney surveyed him in hurt and dignified silence.
+Then--"Well, really, T.A., don't mind me. What you find so
+exquisitely funny--"
+
+"That's the funniest part of it! That you, of all people,
+shouldn't see the joke. Not exactly bad!" He wiped his eyes. "Why,
+do you mean to tell me that because your young cub of a son, by a
+heaven-sent stroke of good fortune, has landed a job that men
+twice his age would give their eyeteeth to get, I find you sitting
+at the telephone looking as if he had run off with Annie the cook,
+or had had a leg cut off!"
+
+"I suppose it is funny. Only, the joke's on me. That's why I can't
+see it. It means that I'm losing him."
+
+"That's the first selfish word I've ever heard you utter."
+
+"Oh, don't think I'm not happy at his success. Happy! Haven't I
+hoped for it, and worked for it, and prayed for it! Haven't I
+saved for it, and skimped for it! How do you think I could have
+stood those years on the road if I hadn't kept up courage with the
+thought that it was all for him? Don't I know how narrowly Jock
+escaped being the wrong kind! I'm his mother, but I'm not quite
+blind. I know he had the making of a first-class cad. I've seen
+him start off in the wrong direction a hundred times."
+
+"If he has turned out a success, it's because you've steered him
+right. I've watched you make him over. And now, when his big
+chance has come, you--"
+
+"I don't expect you to understand," interrupted Emma McChesney a
+little wearily. "I know it sounds crazy and unreasonable. There's
+only one sort of human being who could understand what I mean.
+That's a woman with a son." She laughed a little shamefacedly.
+"I'm talking like the chorus of a minor-wail sob song, but it's
+the truth."
+
+"If you feel like that, Emma, tell him to stay. The boy wouldn't
+go if he thought it would make you unhappy."
+
+"Not go!" cried Emma McChesney sharply. "I'd like to see him dare
+to refuse it!"
+
+"Well then, what in--" began Buck, bewildered.
+
+"Don't try to understand it, T.A. It's no use. Don't try to poke
+your finger into the whirligig they call 'Woman's Sphere.' Its
+mechanism is too complicated. It's the same quirk that makes women
+pray for daughters and men for sons. It's the same kink that makes
+women read the marriage and death notices first in a newspaper.
+It's the same queer strain that causes a mother to lavish the most
+love on the weakest, wilfullest child. Perhaps I wouldn't have
+loved Jock so much if there hadn't been that streak of yellow in
+him, and if I hadn't had to work so hard to dilute it until now
+it's only a faint cream color. There ought to be a special prayer
+for women who are bringing up their sons alone."
+
+Buck stirred a little uneasily. "I've never heard you talk like
+this before."
+
+"You probably never will again." She swung round to her desk.
+
+T.A. Buck, strolling toward the door, still wore the puzzled look.
+
+"I don't know what makes you take this so seriously. Of course,
+the boy will be a long way off. But then, you've been separated
+from him before. What's the difference now?"
+
+"T.A.," said Emma McChesney solemnly, "Jock will be drawing a
+man-size salary now. Something tells me I'll be a grandmother in
+another two years. Girls aren't letting men like Jock run around
+loose. He'll be gobbled up. Just you wait."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," drawled Buck mischievously. "You've just said
+he's a headstrong young cub. He strikes me as the kind who'd
+raise the dickens if his three-minute egg happened to be five
+seconds overtime."
+
+Emma McChesney swung around in her chair. "Look here, T.A. As
+business partners we've quarreled about everything from silk
+samples to traveling men, and as friends we've wrangled on every
+subject from weather to war. I've allowed you to criticise my soul
+theories, and my new spring hat. But understand that I'm the only
+living person who has the right to villify my son, Jock
+McChesney."
+
+The telephone buzzed a punctuation to this period.
+
+"Baumgartner?" inquired Buck humbly.
+
+She listened a moment, then, over her shoulder,
+"Baumgartner,"--grimly, her hand covering the mouthpiece--"and
+if he thinks that he can work off a lot of last year's silk
+swatches on--Hello! Yes, Mrs. McChesney talking. Look here, Mr.
+Baumgartner--"
+
+And for the time being Emma McChesney, mother, was relegated to
+the background, while Emma McChesney, secretary of the T.A. Buck
+Featherloom Petticoat Company, held the stage.
+
+Having said that she would be home at five-thirty. Mrs. McChesney
+was home at five-thirty, being that kind of a person. Jock came
+in at six, breathless, bright-eyed, eager, and late, being that
+kind of a person.
+
+He found his mother on the floor before the chiffonier in his
+bedroom, surrounded by piles of pajamas, socks, shirts and
+collars.
+
+  [Illustration: "He found his mother on the floor ... surrounded
+  by piles of pajamas, socks, shirts and collars"]
+
+He swooped down upon her from the doorway. "What do you think of
+your blue-eyed boy! Poor, eh?"
+
+Emma McChesney looked up absently. "Jock, these medium-weights of
+yours didn't wear at all, and you paid five dollars for them."
+
+"Medium-weights! What in--"
+
+"You've enough silk socks to last you the rest of your natural
+life. Handkerchiefs, too. But you'll need pajamas."
+
+Jock stooped, gathered up an armful of miscellaneous undergarments
+and tossed them into an open drawer. Then he shut the drawer with
+a bang, reached over, grasped his mother firmly under the arms and
+brought her to her feet with a swing.
+
+"We will now consider the question of summer underwear ended.
+Would it bore you too much to touch lightly on the subject of your
+son's future?"
+
+Emma McChesney, tall, straight, handsome, looked up at her son,
+taller, straighter, handsomer. Then she took him by the coat
+lapels and hugged him.
+
+"You were so bursting with your own glory that I couldn't resist
+teasing you. Besides, I had to do something to keep my mind
+off--off--"
+
+"Why, Blonde dear, you're not--!"
+
+"No, I'm not," gulped Emma McChesney. "Don't flatter yourself,
+young 'un. Tell me just how it happened. From the beginning." She
+perched at the side of the bed. Jock, hands in pockets, hair a
+little rumpled, paced excitedly up and down before her as he
+talked.
+
+"There wasn't any beginning. That's the stunning part of it. I
+just landed right into the middle of it with both feet. I knew
+they had been planning to start a big Western branch. But we all
+thought they'd pick some big man for it. There are plenty of
+medium-class dubs to be had. The kind that answers the ad:
+'Manager wanted, young man, preferably married, able to furnish
+A-1 reference.' They're as thick as advertising men in Detroit on
+Monday morning. But we knew that this Western branch was going to
+be given an equal chance with the New York office. Those big
+Western advertisers like to give their money to Western firms if
+they can. So we figured that they'd pick a real top-notcher--even
+Hopper, or Hupp, maybe--and start out with a bang. So when the Old
+Man called me into his office this morning I was as unconscious as
+a babe. Well, you know Berg. He's as unexpected as a summer shower
+and twice as full of electricity.
+
+"'Morning, McChesney!' he said. 'That a New York necktie you're
+wearing?'
+
+"'Strictly,' says I.
+
+"'Ever try any Chicago ties?'
+
+"'Not from choice. That time my suit case went astray--'
+
+"'M-m-m-m, yes.' He drummed his fingers on the table top a couple
+of times. Then--McChesney, what have you learned about advertising
+in the last two and a half years?'
+
+"I was wise enough as to Bartholomew Berg to know that he didn't
+mean any cut-and-dried knowledge. He didn't mean rules of the
+game. He meant tricks.
+
+"'Well,' I said, 'I've learned to watch a man's eyes when I'm
+talking business to him. If the pupils of his eyes dilate he's
+listening to you, and thinking about what you're saying. When they
+contract it means that he's only faking interest, even though he's
+looking straight at you and wearing a rapt expression. His
+thoughts are miles away.'
+
+"'That so?' said Berg, and sort of grinned. 'What else?'
+
+"'I've learned that one negative argument is worth six positive
+ones; that it never pays to knock your competitor; that it's wise
+to fight shy of that joker known as "editorial coöperation."'
+
+"'That so?' said Berg. 'Anything else?'
+
+"I made up my mind I could play the game as long as he could.
+
+"'I've learned not to lose my temper when I'm in the middle of a
+white-hot, impassioned business appeal and the office boy bounces
+in to say to the boss: "Mrs. Jones is waiting. She says you were
+going to help her pick out wall paper this morning;" and Jones
+says, "Tell her I'll be there in five minutes."'
+
+"'Sure you've learned that?' said Berg.
+
+"'Sure,' says I. 'And I've learned to let the other fellow think
+your argument's his own. He likes it. I've learned that the
+surest kind of copy is the slow, insidious kind, like the
+Featherloom Petticoat Company's campaign. That was an ideal
+campaign because it didn't urge and insist that the public buy
+Featherlooms. It just eased the idea to them. It started by
+sketching a history of the petticoat, beginning with Eve's fig
+leaf and working up. Before they knew it they were interested.'
+
+"'That so? That campaign was your mother's idea, McChesney.' You
+know, Mother, he thinks you're a wonder."
+
+"So I am," agreed Emma McChesney calmly. "Go on."
+
+"Well, I went on. I told him that I'd learned to stand so that the
+light wouldn't shine in my client's eyes when I was talking to
+him. I lost a big order once because the glare from the window
+irritated the man I was talking to. I told Berg all the tricks I'd
+learned, and some I hadn't thought of till that minute. Berg put
+in a word now and then. I thought he was sort of guying me, as he
+sometimes does--not unkindly, you know, but in that quiet way he
+has. Finally I stopped for breath, or something, and he said:
+
+"'Now let me talk a minute, McChesney. Anybody can teach you the
+essentials of the advertising business, if you've any advertising
+instinct in you. But it's what you pick up on the side, by your
+own efforts and out of your own experience, that lifts you out of
+the scrub class. Now I don't think you're an ideal advertising man
+by any means, McChesney. You're shy on training and experience,
+and you've just begun to acquire that golden quality known as
+balance. I could name a hundred men that are better all-around
+advertising men than you will ever be. Those men have advertising
+ability that glows steadily and evenly, like a well-banked fire.
+But you've got the kind of ability that flares up, dies down,
+flares up. But every flare is a real blaze that lights things red
+while it lasts, and sends a new glow through the veins of
+business. You've got personality, and youth, and enthusiasm, and a
+precious spark of the real thing known as advertising genius.
+There's no describing it. You know what I mean. Also, you
+know enough about actual advertising not to run an ad for a
+five-thousand-dollar motor car in the "Police Gazette." All of
+which leads up to this question: How would you like to buy your
+neckties in Chicago, McChesney?'
+
+"'Chicago!' I blurted.
+
+"'We've taken a suite of offices in the new Lakeview Building on
+Michigan Avenue. Would you like your office done in mahogany or
+oak?'"
+
+Jock came to a full stop before his mother. His cheeks were
+scarlet. Hers were pale. He was breathing quickly. She was very
+quiet. His eyes glowed. So did hers, but the glow was dimmed by a
+mist.
+
+"Mahogany's richer, but make it oak, son. It doesn't show
+finger-marks so." Then, quite suddenly, she stood up, shaking a
+little, and buried her face in the boy's shoulder.
+
+"Why--why, Mother! Don't! Don't, Blonde. We'll see each other
+every few weeks. I'll be coming to New York to see the sights,
+like the rest of the rubes, and I suppose the noise and lights
+will confuse me so that I'll be glad to get back to the sylvan
+quiet of Chicago. And then you'll run out there, eh? We'll have
+regular bats, Mrs. Mack. Dinner and the theater and supper! Yes?"
+
+"Yes," said Emma McChesney, in muffled tones that totally lacked
+enthusiasm.
+
+"Chicago's really only a suburb of New York, anyway, these days,
+and--"
+
+Emma McChesney's head came up sharply. "Look here, son. If you're
+going to live in Chicago I advise you to cut that suburb talk, and
+sort of forget New York. Chicago's quite a village, for an inland
+settlement, even if it has only two or three million people, and a
+lake as big as all outdoors. That kind of talk won't elect you to
+the University Club, son."
+
+So they talked, all through supper and during the evening. Rather,
+Jock talked and his mother listened, interrupting with only an
+occasional remark when the bubble of the boy's elation seemed to
+grow too great.
+
+Quite suddenly Jock was silent. After the almost incessant rush of
+conversation quiet settled down strangely on the two seated there
+in the living-room with its soft-shaded lamps. Jock picked up a
+magazine, twirled its pages, put it down, strolled into his own
+room, and back again.
+
+"Mother," he said suddenly, standing before her, "there was a
+time when you were afraid I wasn't going to pan out, wasn't
+there?"
+
+"Not exactly afraid, dear, just a little doubtful, perhaps."
+
+Jock smiled a tolerant, forgiving smile. "You see, Mother, you
+didn't understand, that's all. A woman doesn't. I was all right. A
+man would have realized that. I don't mean, dear, that you haven't
+always been wonderful, because you have. But it takes a man to
+understand a man. When you thought I was going bad on your hands I
+was just developing, that's all. Remember that time in Chicago,
+Mother?"
+
+"Yes," answered Emma McChesney, "I remember."
+
+"Now a man would have understood that that was only kid
+foolishness. If a fellow's got the stuff in him it'll show up,
+sooner or later. If I hadn't had it in me I wouldn't be going to
+Chicago as manager of the Berg, Shriner Western office, would I?"
+
+"No, dear."
+
+Jock looked at her. In an instant he was all contrition and
+tenderness. "You're tired. I've talked you to death, haven't I?
+Lordy, it's midnight! And I want to get down early to-morrow.
+Conference with Mr. Berg, and Hupp." He tried not to sound too
+important.
+
+Emma McChesney took his head between her two hands and kissed him
+once on the lips, then, standing a-tiptoe, kissed his eyelids with
+infinite gentleness as you kiss a baby's eyes. Then she brought
+his cheek up against hers. And so they stood for a moment,
+silently.
+
+Ten minutes later there came the sound of blithe whistling from
+Jock's room. Jock always whistled when he went to bed and when he
+rose. Even these years of living in a New York apartment had
+not broken him of the habit. It was a cheerful, disconnected
+whistling, sometimes high and clear, sometimes under the breath,
+sometimes interspersed with song, and sometimes ceasing altogether
+at critical moments, say, during shaving, or while bringing the
+four-in-hand up tight and snug under the collar. It was one of
+those comfortable little noises that indicate a masculine
+presence; one of those pleasant, reassuring, man-in-the-house
+noises that every woman loves.
+
+Emma McChesney, putting herself to bed in her room across the
+hall, found herself listening, brush poised, lips parted, as
+though to the exquisite strains of celestial music. There came the
+thump of a shoe on the floor. An interval of quiet. Then another
+thump. Without having been conscious of it, Emma McChesney had
+grown to love the noises that accompanied Jock's retiring and
+rising. His dressing was always signalized by bangings and
+thumpings. His splashings in the tub were tremendous. His morning
+plunge could be heard all over the six-room apartment. Mrs.
+McChesney used to call gayly through the door:
+
+"Mercy, Jock! You sound like a school of whales coming up for
+air."
+
+"You'll think I'm a school of sharks when it comes to breakfast,"
+Jock would call back. "Tell Annie to make enough toast, Mum. She's
+the tightest thing with the toast I ever did--"
+
+The rest would be lost in a final surging splash.
+
+The noises in the room across the hall had subsided now. She
+listened more intently. No, a drawer banged. Another. Then:
+
+"Hasn't my gray suit come back from the tailor's?"
+
+"It was to be sponged, too, you know. He said he'd bring it
+Wednesday. This is Tuesday."
+
+"Oh!" Another bang. Then: '"Night, Mother!"
+
+"Good night, dear." Creaking sounds, then a long, comfortable sigh
+of complete relaxation.
+
+Emma McChesney went on with her brushing. She brushed her hair
+with the usual number of swift even strokes, from the top of the
+shining head to the waist. She braided her hair into two plaits,
+Gretchen fashion. Millions of scanty-locked women would have given
+all they possessed to look as Emma McChesney looked standing there
+in kimono and gown. She nicked out the light. Then she, too,
+relaxed upon her pillow with a little sigh. Quiet fell on the
+little apartment. The street noises came up to her, now roaring,
+now growing faint. Emma McChesney lay there sleepless. She lay
+flat, hands clasped across her breast, her braids spread out on
+the pillow. In the darkness of the room the years rolled before
+her in panorama: her girlhood, her marriage, her unhappiness,
+Jock, the divorce, the struggle for work, those ten years on the
+road. Those ten years on the road! How she had hated them--and
+loved them. The stuffy trains, the jarring sleepers, the bare
+little hotel bedrooms, the bad food, the irregular hours, the
+loneliness, the hard work, the disappointments, the temptations.
+Yes but the fascination of it, the dear friends she had made, the
+great human lesson of it all! And all for Jock. That Jock might
+have good schools, good clothes, good books, good surroundings,
+happy times. Why, Jock had been the reason for it all! She had
+swallowed insult because of Jock. She had borne the drudgery
+because of Jock. She had resisted temptation, smiled under
+hardship, worked, fought, saved, succeeded, all because of Jock.
+And now this pivot about which her whole life had revolved was to
+be pulled up, wrenched away.
+
+Over Emma McChesney, lying there in the dark, there swept one of
+those unreasoning night-fears. The fear of living. The fear of
+life. A straining of the eyeballs in the dark. The pounding of
+heart-beats.
+
+She sat up in bed. Her hands went to her face. Her cheeks were
+burning and her eyes smarted. She felt that she must see Jock. At
+once. Just to be near him. To touch him. To take him in her arms,
+with his head in the hollow of her breast, as she used to when he
+was a baby. Why, he had been a baby only yesterday. And now he was
+a man. Big enough to stand alone, to live alone, to do without
+her.
+
+Emma McChesney flung aside the covers and sprang out of bed. She
+thrust her feet in slippers, groped for the kimono at the foot of
+the bed and tiptoed to the door. She listened. No sound from the
+other room. She stole across the hall, stopped, listened, gained
+the door. It was open an inch or more. Just to be near him, to
+know that he lay there, sleeping! She pushed the door very, very
+gently. Then she stood in the doorway a moment, scarcely
+breathing, her head thrust forward, her whole body tense with
+listening. She could not hear him breathe! She caught her breath
+again in that unreasoning fear and took a quick step forward.
+
+"Stop or I'll shoot!" said a voice. Simultaneously the light
+flashed on. Emma McChesney found herself blinking at a determined
+young man who was steadily pointing a short, chubby, businesslike
+looking steel affair in her direction. Then the hand that held the
+steel dropped.
+
+"What is this, anyway?" demanded Jock rather crossly. "A George
+Cohan comedy?"
+
+Emma McChesney leaned against the foot of the bed rather weakly.
+
+"What did you think--"
+
+"What would you think if you heard some one come sneaking along
+the hall, stopping, listening, sneaking to your door, and then
+opening it, and listening again, and sneaking in? What would you
+think it was? How did I know you were going around making social
+calls at two o'clock in the morning!"
+
+Suddenly Emma McChesney began to laugh. She leaned over the
+footboard and laughed hysterically, her head in her arms. Jock
+stared a moment in offended disapproval. Then the humor of it
+caught him, and he buried his head in his pillow to stifle
+unseemly shrieks. His legs kicked spasmodically beneath the
+bedclothes.
+
+As suddenly as she had begun to laugh Mrs. McChesney became very
+sober.
+
+"Stop it, Jock! Tell me, why weren't you sleeping?"
+
+"I don't know," replied Jock, as suddenly solemn. "I--sort
+of--began to think, and I couldn't sleep."
+
+"What were you thinking of?"
+
+Jock looked down at the bedclothes and traced a pattern with one
+forefinger on the sheet. Then he looked up.
+
+"Thinking of you."
+
+"Oh!" said Emma McChesney, like a bashful schoolgirl. "Of--me!"
+
+Jock sat up very straight and clasped his hands about his knees.
+"I got to thinking of what I had said about having made good all
+alone. That's rot. It isn't so. I was striped with yellow like a
+stick of lemon candy. If I've got this far, it's all because of
+you. I've been thinking all along that I was the original electric
+self-starter, when you've really had to get out and crank me every
+few miles."
+
+Into Emma McChesney's face there came a wonderful look. It was the
+sort of look with which a newly-made angel might receive her
+crown and harp. It was the look with which a war-hero sees the
+medal pinned on his breast. It was the look of one who has come
+into her Reward. Therefore:
+
+"What nonsense!" said Emma McChesney. "If you hadn't had it in
+you, it wouldn't have come out."
+
+"It wasn't in me, in the first place," contested Jock stubbornly.
+"You planted it."
+
+From her stand at the foot of the bed she looked at him, her eyes
+glowing brighter and brighter with that wonderful look.
+
+"Now see here,"--severely--"I want you to go to sleep. I don't
+intend to stand here and dispute about your ethical innards at
+this hour. I'm going to kiss you again."
+
+"Oh, well, if you must," grinned Jock resignedly, and folded her
+in a bear-hug.
+
+To Emma McChesney it seemed that the next three weeks leaped by,
+not by days, but in one great bound. And the day came when a
+little, chattering, animated group clustered about the slim young
+chap who was fumbling with his tickets, glancing at his watch,
+signaling a porter for his bags, talking, laughing, trying to hide
+the pangs of departure under a cloak of gayety and badinage that
+deceived no one. Least of all did it deceive the two women who
+stood there. The eyes of the older woman never left his face. The
+eyes of the younger one seldom were raised to his, but she saw his
+every expression. Once Emma McChesney's eyes shifted a little so
+as to include both the girl and the boy in her gaze. Grace Galt in
+her blue serge and smart blue hat was worth a separate glance.
+
+Sam Hupp was there, T.A. Buck, Hopper, who was to be with him in
+Chicago for the first few weeks, three or four of the younger men
+in the office, frankly envious and heartily congratulatory.
+
+They followed him to his train, all laughter and animation.
+
+"If this train doesn't go in two minutes," said Jock, "I'll get
+scared and chuck the whole business. Funny, but I'm not so keen on
+going as I was three weeks ago."
+
+His eyes rested on the girl in the blue serge and the smart hat.
+Emma McChesney saw that. She saw that his eyes still rested there
+as he stood on the observation platform when the train pulled out.
+The sight did not pain her as she thought it would. There was
+success in every line of him as he stood there, hat in hand. There
+was assurance in every breath of him. His clothes, his skin, his
+clear eyes, his slim body, all were as they should be. He had
+made a place in the world. He was to be a builder of ideas. She
+thought of him, and of the girl in blue serge, and of their
+children-to-be.
+
+Her breast swelled exultingly. Her head came up.
+
+This was her handiwork. She looked at it, and found that it was
+good.
+
+"Let's strike for the afternoon and call it a holiday," suggested
+Buck.
+
+Emma McChesney turned. The train was gone. "T.A., you'll never
+grow up."
+
+"Never want to. Come on, let's play hooky, Emma."
+
+"Can't. I've a dozen letters to get out, and Miss Loeb wants to
+show me that new knicker-bocker design of hers."
+
+They drove back to the office almost in silence. Emma McChesney
+made straight for her desk and began dictating letters with an
+energy that bordered on fury. At five o'clock she was still
+working. At five-thirty T.A. Buck came in to find her still
+surrounded by papers, samples, models.
+
+"What is this?" he demanded wrathfully, "an all-night session?"
+
+Emma McChesney looked up from her desk. Her face was flushed, her
+eyes bright, but there was about her an indefinable air of
+weariness.
+
+"T.A., I'm afraid to go home. I'll rattle around in that empty
+flat like a hickory nut in a barrel."
+
+"We'll have dinner down-town and go to the theater."
+
+"No use. I'll have to go home sometime."
+
+"Now, Emma," remonstrated Buck, "you'll soon get used to it. Think
+of all the years you got along without him. You were happy,
+weren't you?"
+
+"Happy because I had somebody to work for, somebody to plan for,
+somebody to worry about. When I think of what that flat will be
+without him--Why, just to wake up and know that you can say good
+morning to some one who cares! That's worth living for, isn't it?"
+
+"Emma," said T.A. evenly, "do you realize that you are virtually
+hounding me into asking you to marry me?"
+
+"T.A.!" gasped Emma McChesney.
+
+"Well, you said you wanted somebody to worry about, didn't you?"
+
+  [Illustration: "'Well, you said you wanted somebody to worry
+  about, didn't you?'"]
+
+A little whimsical smile lay lightly on his lips.
+
+"Timothy Buck, I'm over forty years old."
+
+"Emma, in another minute I'm going to grow sentimental, and
+nothing can stop me."
+
+She looked down at her hands. There fell a little silence. Buck
+stirred, leaned forward. She looked up from the little watch that
+ticked away at her wrist.
+
+"The minute's up, T.A.," said Emma McChesney.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Personality Plus, by Edna Ferber
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12677 ***