He did not rise, but reached up to kiss her as she passed.

“Burnt your soup a little to-night, mother.”

She sat down opposite, breathing deeply outward, spreading her napkin out across her lap.

“It was Edwin coming in from school and getting me worked up with his talk about—­about—­”

“What?”

“Nothing.  Edwin, run out and bring papa the paprika to take the burnt taste out.  I turned all the cuffs on your shirts to-day, Harry.”

“Lordy! if you ain’t fixing at one thing, you’re fixing another.”

“Anything new?”

He was well over his soup now, drinking in long draughts from the tip of his spoon.

“News!  In A. E. Unger’s office, a man don’t get his nose far enough up from the ledger to even smell news.”

“I see Goldfinch & Goetz failed.”

“Could have told ’em they’d go under, trying to put on a spectacular show written in verse.  That same show boiled down to good Forty-second Street lingo with some good shapes and a proposition like Alma Zitelle to lift it from poetry to punch has a world of money in it for somebody.  A war spectacular show filled with sure-fire patriotic lines, a bunch of show-girl battalions, and a figure like Alma Zitelle’s for the Goddess of Liberty—­a world of money, I tell you!”

“Honest, Harry?”

“That trench scene they built for that show is as fine a contrivance as I’ve ever seen of the kind.  What did they do?  Set it to a lot of music without a hum or a ankle in it.  A few classy nurses like the Mercy Militia Sextet, some live, grand-old-flag tunes by Harry Mordelle, and there’s a half a million dollars in that show.  Unger thinks I’m crazy when I try to get him interested, but I—­”

“I got ninety in manual training to-day, pop.”

“That’s good, son.  Little more of that stew, mother?”

“Unger isn’t so smart, honey, he can’t afford to take a tip off you once in a while:  you’ve proved that to him.”

“Yes, but go tell him so.”

“He’ll live to see the day he’s got to give you credit for being the first to see money in ‘Pan-America.’”

“Credit?  Huh! to hear him tell it, he was born with that idea in his bullet head.”

“I’d like to hear him say it to me, if ever I lay eyes on him, that it wasn’t you who begged him to get into it.”

“I’ll show ’em some day in that office that I can pick the winners for myself, as well as for the other fellow.  Believe me, Unger hasn’t raised me to fifty a week for my fancy bookkeeping, and he knows it, and, what’s more, he knows I know he knows it.”

“The fellers that are goin’ to college next term have to register for the High School College Society, pop—­dollar dues.”

“Well, you aren’t going to college, and that’s where you and I save a hundred cents on the dollar.  Little more gravy, mother.”

The muscles of Edwin’s face relaxed, his mouth dropping to a pout, the crude features quivering.