So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the elevator, he would gradually scale the heights.  Ascending stairway after stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his own wonderland.  When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial attention.

“The boss!” he heard one of the model girls say.

Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his principality.  The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.

“The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day,” said the model girl to a customer; “and what he don’t see don’t count!”

“Not much older; not much changed!” thought Jack; and his realization of the disinterestedness of his observation tipped the needles with acid.

In the sharpness of the master’s button-counting survey there was swift finality; and his impressions completed, analyzed, docketed for reference, he ran on up the flight with light step, still rubbing the palms of his hands in the unctuously well-contained and appreciative sense of his power.  To Jack he was a fascinating, grand, distant figure, this of his own father, yet mortally near.

If the model girl had had the same keenness of observation for what is borne in the face as for what is worn on the back, she could not have failed to note the strong family resemblance between the young man standing near her and the man who had paused on the stairway.  This glimpse of his father’s mastery of every detail of that organization which he had built, this glimpse of cool, self-centered authority, only reminded Jack of his own ignorance and flightiness in view of all that would be expected of him.  He knew less than one of the cash girls about how to run the store.  A duel with Leddy was a simple matter beside this battle he had to wage.

He mounted the last flight of stairs into an area of glass-paneled doors, behind which the creative business of the great concern was conducted.  Out of one marked “Private,” closing it softly and stepping softly, came a round-shouldered, stooping man of middle age, with the apprehensive and palliating manner of a long-service private secretary who has many things to remember and many persons to appease with explanations.  It was evident that Peter Mortimer had just come from The Presence.  At sight of Jack he drew back in a surprise that broke into a beaming delight which played over his tired and wrinkled features in ecstasy.

“Jack!  Jack!  You did it!  You did it!” he cried.