“No.  A. E. Unger never seen the inside of a high school, much less a college, and I guess he’s made as good a pile as most.  I’ve worked for the butcher and the landlord all my life, and now I ain’t going to begin being a slave to my boy.  There’s been two or three times in my life where, for want of a few dirty dollars to make a right start, I’d be, a rich man to-day.  My boy’s going to get that right start.”

“But, Harry, college will—­”

“I seen money in ‘Pan-America’ long before Unger ever dreamed of producing it.  I sicked him onto ‘The Official Chaperon’ when every manager in town had turned it down.  I went down and seen ’em doing ‘The White Elephant’ in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway.  Where’s it got me?  Nowhere.  Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, when I came down here too late in life, got in the rut of a salaried man.  Well, where it ’ain’t got me it’s going to get my son.  I’m missing a chance, to-day that, mark my word, would make me a rich man but for want of a few—­”

“Harry, you mean that?”

“My hunch never fails me.”

She was leaning across the table, her hands clasping its edge, her small, plump face even pinker.

He threw out his legs beneath the table and sat back, hands deep in pockets, and a toothpick hanging limp from between lips that were sagging.

“Gad! if I had my life to live over again as a salaried man, I’d—­I’d hang myself first!  The way to start a boy to a million dollars in this business is to start him young in the producing-end of a strong firm.”

“You—­got faith in this Goldfinch & Goetz failure like you had in ‘Pan-America’ and ‘The Chaperon,’ Harry?”

“I said it five years ago and it come to pass.  I say it now.  For want of a few dirty dollars I’m a poor man till I die.”

“How—­many dollars, Harry?”

“Don’t make me say it, Millie—­it makes me sick to my stummick.  Three thousand dollars would buy the whole spectacle to save it from the storehouse.  I tried Charley Ryan—­he wouldn’t risk a ten-spot on a failure.”

“Harry, I—­oh, Harry—­”

“Why, mother, what’s the matter?  You been overworking again, ironing my shirts and collars when they ought to go to the laundry?  You—­”

“Harry, what would you say if—­if I was to tell you something?”

“What is it, mother?  You better get Annie in on Mondays.  We ’ain’t got any more to show without her than with her.”

“Harry, we—­have!”

“Well, you just had an instance of the thanks you get.”

“Harry, what—­what would you say if I could let you have nearly all of that three thousand?”

He regarded her above the flare of a match to his cigar-end.

“Huh?”

“If I could let you have twenty-six hundred seventeen dollars and about fifty cents of it?”